


A Real Friend Walked In

by crisiskris



Category: The Librarians (TV 2014)
Genre: Baird is a Good Bro, Between Episodes, Friendship, Gen, Jenkins is a Good Bro too, Season 1, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:42:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 24,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26047459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crisiskris/pseuds/crisiskris
Summary: Baird and Jenkins are both in need of a bestie.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 28





	1. Prologue: The Sword in the Stone

**Author's Note:**

> I own nothing and mean no harm.

> A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out
> 
> ~Walter Winchell

+++

Eve Baird was not generally a spontaneous person; nor was she a pushover. So, she couldn’t quite explain how she’d managed to get herself wrapped up in the tornado with skin that was Flynn Carsen. One minute she was working what she’d thought was a fairly unusual job, searching out weapons of mass destruction as a member of an elite NATO task force. The next moment, well… there was magic, and villains, and multiple dimensions, and every minute she was frantically adapting her working definition of the word ‘unusual’. 

She had felt rather proud of herself for keeping up, for jumping into her not-entirely-welcome role of “guardian”, whatever that meant. By the end of it all, when Flynn impulsively decided that the three rescues should be trained to be librarians, she felt like she was pretty much on top of things, thank you very much. So, she probably should have predicted that Flynn would go ahead and pull the rug out from under her feet again when he told her that she wasn’t coming with him.

“I trust you to protect them,” he said. He went on to explain that he was sure that’s what the library had chosen her to do. “And lord knows, they’re going to need protecting,” he finished up, “More than I’m going to need – than I want to be travelling the world with you.” He gave her a look that seemed to go right through her.

She’d been in this position before. “The job’s more important than what we want,” she said. It was old hat, really.

But he demurred. “Well, don’t say that, that was the old way,” he said. “ _For now_ , we have to work separately.”

And Eve, well… Eve didn’t typically act on her impulses. So, she didn’t really have a good explanation for the fact that she grabbed him by his lapels, jerked him off balance, and kissed him fiercely.

“Come back alive, Librarian,” she said, using her best NATO Commander voice to cover for the fact that she had no idea why she had done what she had just done.

“I’ll come back, yeah, come back and we’ll talk – phew. Sorry, I’m, I’ll, no, I’ll text you, or you text me. We’ll text each other and it’ll be one of things – okay, so yeah.” She stood at ease as he turned to go, clearly flummoxed. Her heart was beating rapidly under her cool exterior. It had been one hell of a kiss.

Unfortunately, Eve didn’t have a chance to linger with her feelings as Flynn walked away from her. She could hear Jenkins in the other room gearing up to push her three young librarians-in-training out the door.

 _Damn_. Jenkins could be a real problem. He’d been willing to help Flynn because he was the librarian, and he’d given her some sage advice on how to manage Flynn’s grief to keep him on track, but it was clear that he didn’t want them there. She hadn’t had much time to form an impression of the other man, but she’d sensed the undercurrent of anger in their interactions. He was big enough to be harmful he if got violent and smart enough to be harmful if he got mean. She was going to have to beat him into submission, and quick, before he said or did something that destroyed the tenuous confidence that her fledglings had just built – or worse.

She walked back in the room just as he said, “But, I don’t…”

“Really have a choice,” she interrupted. She caught a glimpse of the smug smile on Jones’s face as she came to stand in front of Jenkins, making a show of how un-intimidating she found him. “These three will be using this as their base of operations and I’ll be supervising their security so…” she stepped up close, looking him straight in the eye, “Make yourself useful, or make yourself gone.”

Jenkins’ eyes narrowed. “You’re bluffing,” he countered, but his tone wasn’t angry; more… curious. Eve didn’t change tactics, though, and kept up the glare while her three trainees voiced their adamant disagreement. Cassandra said something about Eve kicking his ass, and Jenkins broke Eve’s gaze to give the young woman an, ‘oh, please’ look. In the back of her mind, Eve acknowledged that if it came to a physical confrontation, Jenkins likely had the advantage. Good thing she was armed.

But when he looked back to Eve, she could see uncertainty in his eyes. In fact, he looked embarrassed. He seemed to be pleading with her for a moment, and then gave way, hunching down so that he lost three inches of height all at once. “I suppose there’s always the clippings book,” he offered, turning back to the librarians, and Eve suddenly clued in to how poorly she’d approached the man: the issue wasn’t anger, it was pride, and she hadn’t given him a tactful way out. She’d just marched in and ordered him around.

Fortunately, Cassandra saved the moment by asking, “what’s a clippings book?” It inadvertently gave Jenkins what Eve had failed to offer – the opportunity to assert his superiority.

“Oh, child of the annoying digital age,” Jenkins replied, and then launched into an explanation. Eve watched, amused, as her trainees eagerly gathered around him and he launched into full instructor mode. She watched his face become more animated and his body language relax. With a bit of space to breathe and observe, it came to her that there was something else Jenkins needed, in addition to his pride: purpose.

She turned away, taking in the annex and all the things within it. There was a reason that Jenkins had settled in here, tinkering with things. He needed something meaningful to do. Well, she thought, with these three, they were certainly going to be busy.


	2. The Horns of a Dilemma

The fact that she had a bit of insight into the man didn’t mean that they were on the same page, however. She spent the first night after Flynn left developing a careful training regimen and implemented it the next day. Jenkins, far from being useful like she’d asked him to be, watched from the sidelines and offered acerbic remarks, while simultaneously dropping hints about all sorts of adventures that awaited them in the real world.

“How substandard were they?” He called to her as they returned from yet another poorly executed training mission, passing by them with a large globe in his hands.

“Good pep talk, Jenkins,” she answered, giving him two sarcastic thumbs up.

He ignored her entirely, turning back at the hall entrance to speak over her head at the trainees. “While you were out, a new page appeared in the clippings book. Looks fascinating.” And then she had to deal with the three trainees who were now totally off track. Cassandra actually ran up to the book, and Stone was in full-on rant mode.

She listened halfheartedly as they complained, but her eyes were on the old man as he disappeared around the corner. He gave her a little nod as he slipped through the doors. “You’re not ready,” she scolded them, equally halfheartedly, and then took off down the hallway after Jenkins. She was done with him undermining her; it stopped now.

“Jenkins stay out –” she demanded, storming into the room at the end of the hall. The rest of her sentence went unspoken as she was brought up short, her eyes widening as she took in the cluttered, dark, and mystifying room. He gave her a pleased smile.

“Marvelous, isn’t it?” he said. “I tell you, this is where I do my research. Judson always insisted that we just lock the artifacts away, but I experiment on them, study them – improve them.” He tinkered with whatever it was he’d been connecting to the now half-a-globe, making a satisfied sound. His pride was evident, and Eve wished she’d bothered to track him down in his lab earlier. It obviously meant a great deal to the man.

But she had a mission right now, so she quickly refocused, leaning in toward him and saying, earnestly, equal-to-equal, “It’s hard enough to rein them in without you dangling that clippings book in front of them.”

“Why rein them? You’ll have to put them in the field sooner or later.” His answer caught her off guard for a moment; she’d thought he hadn’t realized what he was doing. It hadn’t occurred to her that he’d been doing it intentionally.

“I’ve gone into the field with experienced soldiers, with a good plan and good intel, and still come home with nothing but dog tags,” she said, staring him down. To his credit, he didn’t try to interrupt, just watched her with knowing eyes as she continued, “I’m talking soldiers with training, who’ve seen combat. These three? I promised Flynn I’d keep them alive. They’re not even close to ready.”

“I appreciate that you want to keep them out of harm’s way,” he replied, “but librarians exist to keep magic out of the wrong hands. Hence, their job is to be in harm’s way.”

Eve resisted the urge to smack him. “I can’t protect all three of them at once and they can’t take care of themselves – not without a lot more training.” How could the man be so cavalier?

But Jenkins just said, “We used to put librarians in the field with no training at all,” his attention back on his work. Now she got it. He just didn’t care.

“Oh yeah?” she said, anger colouring her tone. “And how many came back?”

His face was stony, unmoved. “The best ones,” he replied, and looked pointedly down at his work.

She recognized a dismissal when she heard one, and it was clearly pointless to try to convince him he was wrong. So, she turned on her heel, stalking out. She wasn’t sure who she was angrier with – him, for being so callous, or herself, for not getting through to him. When she got back to the main room, she decided she was angrier at him, because the trainees were all heels-fully-dug-in about jumping into the clippings book case.

There was definitely no stopping them now, so Eve gave in, shouting orders as her recruits excitedly got to work. A few hours in, she had to admit, they were doing well, pulling research together in an efficient and objective manner. They had listened to her orders and done what she said, and the intel they were compiling was good. She was just starting to feel in control again when Jenkins interrupted, rolling his recombined globe through the group, and then walking back out, and the coming back through again, this time with jumper cables, completely disrupting her flow.

“What are you doing?” she demanded.

“Sending you to Boston,” he answered, as it if were obvious. “I present to you the back door.”

“Yeah, that’s the broom closet,” she answered, thinking maybe he had lost his mind.

Jenkins was in his element as he corrected her and took over the entire meeting, directing Stone to assist him. Eve choked back her anger as she watched him. He was in teacher mode, but he was also doing that hunched-over thing that he had done before, when he was trying to connect with her, and when their eyes met, his seemed worried. She tried to relax a bit, communicating openness as he completed his explanation – that is, until he spun the globe and the doors changed. Then she lost the thread of any kind of strategy. Her arms fell to her side and her mouth dropped open in wonder.

She and Stone opened the broom closet door and found themselves staring into an alley. Together, they stuck their heads out, and then their whole bodies. She stumbled as she crossed the threshold and belatedly Jenkins warned her, “that first step might be just a little…”

She shouted back something sarcastic on reflex, but the truth was, she was amazed. They all were. Cassandra ran back in, excitedly babbling about wormholes, and Eve followed. She came to rest next to Jenkins, looking up at him in appreciation. She was about to compliment him when he suddenly tensed and started muttering about all the things that were wrong with his creation. That was interesting, but she didn’t have time to address it, because Jones had started theorizing about robbing banks, and the others were clearly itching to get going.

“Good luck,” she thought she heard Jenkins say as she went to follow her trainees through the door.

“What?”

He looked discomfited. “Nothing. Go away. I’m working.”

+++

It didn’t take long for the worst-case scenario she had anticipated to be set in motion. Within fifteen minutes, she’d already had to knock a man unconscious, had lost her trainees, had to shoot a… something, and then discovered that the thing didn’t stay dead. They were literally at the fleeing for their lives stage, holed up in a storage room trying to keep closed a door that the monster was basically punching through, when Jenkins opened the backdoor. She’d asked him to make himself useful and boy howdy, that thing was _useful_.

It was half-sized, attached to a cabinet, and upside down, but it was a door. The trainees, predictably, froze. Eve didn’t. She grabbed Jones and thrust him through, then grabbed Cassandra. Stone, who was actually shaping up to be somewhat effective, stayed at the other door until she shouted him through, and entered at a run. She followed, somersaulting, and was pleased to see Stone understood her intent when she drew her weapon; he armed himself as she re-opened the door. But it just led back to Boston.

Jenkins was jabbering on, infuriatingly calm. “So,” he finished, clapping his hands together, “first time out – how did it go?” Even contemplated drawing her weapon again.

+++

Half an hour later, after they’d all had a chance to regroup, they were gathered around the Annex table again, listening to the explanation. While he was focused on the trainees, Jenkins was helpful and informative. However, the minute he glanced over and saw Eve listening, his eyes gleamed. Stone commented about the artifact – the ball of thread – being millennia old, and Jenkins leaned over and said, “Millennia means thousands of years,” ignoring the way she glared at him. He followed the jab up with a pile of books and the advice that minotaurs were “nasty creatures; hold a grudge,” and walked out. _Smug when he’s on top_ , she thought, _but doesn’t like praise. Interesting combination_.

She scooted after him and didn’t even pretend that she wasn’t reporting in when she explained what she had tried and how it hadn’t worked. He didn’t seem surprised, explaining that you couldn’t kill an immortal being. “If I can’t kill him, what am I going to do?” She replied. It was just dawning on her that the trainees were not the only ones who might be out of their depth.

Jenkins bent over so that he could look at her eye-to-eye, cutting her off mid-panic. “Colonel, the library chose you for a reason – and trust me, it wasn’t because of your ability to kill.” He walked away, leaving her to mull those words over. If not her ability to kill, then what? It was obvious. She wasn’t just a soldier; she was a NATO operative. She didn’t just execute missions. She planned them.

 _Good pep talk, Jenkins,_ she thought, drawing herself straight before returning to her team. They had a mission to organize.

+++

Her newfound appreciation for the man didn’t last long. Shortly after attempting to execute their plan, they found themselves hopelessly deadlocked, and when she called for help, all he could say was “huh.”

“So, annoying or cryptic, those are your two speeds, huh?”

Jenkins didn’t respond to the taunt. And then she didn’t have time to be angry because first she, then Stone, were flying toward a brick building. The minotaur had found them. She could hear Jenkins shouting her name and a distant part of her mind was touched that he sounded so worried, but there wasn’t time.

“Jenkins!” she screamed, and he came through with a last-ditch, temporary… bubble thing, to protect them from the view of the minotaur for just a few minutes. She barked out orders at the team. Cassandra, of all people, said no.

“That’s not a suggestion, it’s an order,” she said.

“And I’m not a soldier,” Cassandra replied.

Eve was brought up short. _Why rein them?_ She heard Jenkins ask in her head. She was doing it again, going about things all wrong. She’d been trying to train them to be her when she needed to play to their strengths. “You’re right,” she conceded. “I am, but you’re not. You’re librarians. Librarians win because of what they know. So, what do you know?” The team froze before her. “Come on, guys,” she prodded, “What do you know?”

After that, after she gave up control, things moved fast. While Jones and Cassandra went to figure out the maze, she and stone tried to distract the minotaur. He was more powerful than anything she had ever seen, and soon they had no choice but to retreat to the Annex. Jenkins made a smart-ass remark about there being only two of them before he realized the minotaur was right outside the door.

“Is that thing trying to get into my annex?” he said, his eyes widening. “You led that back here?” It was the first time she’d heard genuine anger in his voice.

“NOT NOW!” she shouted back, and Jenkins dropped it, running to help.

Then, in an instant, the minotaur was gone. Eve cautiously opened the door. A great wind rushed into the room.

“I believe I said, with a whoosh,” Jenkins said, but all Eve could think was that two of her fledglings – two of her teammates – were gone. Then the ball of thread flew into the room and without even thinking, Eve grabbed an edge and jumped into the void.

A few moments later, she followed them back in. Jenkins was right there, grabbing her arm and pulling her mightily, then slamming the doors shut. The wind hardly seemed to move him.

They all stared at each other, breathless. Eve grinned. They’d won.

+++

Later that night, she made her apologies to the team, acknowledging she had been wrong to treat them like subordinates. Stone suggested that what they were was partners. He was right, and she said as much. Those relationships repaired, it occurred to her that she needed to have the same conversation with Jenkins. She went back to his lab, but he wasn’t there, so she wandered further down the hall, following the soft glow of a light. It was shining out from under a mostly closed door. It squeaked as she pushed it open, and she saw Jenkins climbing to his feet as the room came into view.

“Colonel Baird,” he said sternly as she walked in. “Unlike you, I have no other home to go to. This is a private space.”

“This is… your home?” she asked, looking around. There was a large leather wing-back chair in one corner, at an angle that allowed a view of the door but was open to a wide stone fireplace, where a small fire was currently crackling. The lighting was soft. There was a desk and a bookshelf along the opposite wall, filling the space on either side of another door that led off to shadows. There were soft rugs on the floor and large paintings adorned the walls. There were no windows.

“Colonel.” Jenkins said again, his voice a bit more adamant.

She came back to herself. “I apologize,” she said, realizing that she’d just blundered into his living space without invitation. “I didn’t – well, I guess I didn’t think about it at all.”

“Indeed,” he replied, turning away. His voice held a note of sadness. “Why would you?”

“That’s sort of what I wanted to talk to you about,” she said. “If… if it’s alright that I stay for a minute?”

The tension in his frame lessened at the request, and he gestured toward the chair. After a moment, she sat, perched on the edge, and he pulled up an ottoman to sit across from her. “What’s on your mind, Colonel?”

“I owe you an apology,” she said. He waved his hand dismissively, but she shook her head. “No, I do. I was wrong in how I approached you when we first arrived. I’ve been barking out orders, telling everyone what to do, expecting them to fall in line. I should have been asking. I should have asked you if you’d like to be a part of our team.”

“Well, as you pointed out a week ago, Colonel, I don’t really have a choice.” His tone was matter of fact, but his eyes cut to the side when he said it, and she could read between the lines. He was more than embarrassed. Humiliated.

“I don’t know how all this works, with you and the library,” she said. “But with you and me, Jenkins, I want you to know, you always have a choice. Your autonomy is important to me, and I want to respect it. If I’m asking something that’s not appropriate, or too much, or… whatever, I want you to feel like you can tell me that. You can say no to me.” His gaze fell to his knees, hands twitching. She leaned forward. “You came through for us, Jenkins. You were there when we needed you, you helped us figure out what to do… I thought they weren’t ready. But it was me. _I_ wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready, and you had my back. I just want you to know that, however I can – I’ve got yours.”

Jenkins looked up finally, smiling, a genuine smile without a trace of sarcasm, the most unguarded look she’d seen yet on his face. “Thank you, Colonel,” he replied softly. “I have absolute faith in your word.” He stood, gesturing at the door. “Now, please get out.”

Eve smiled, standing. “Good night, Jenkins,” she said, crossing the room and shutting the door firmly behind her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I haven't seen the entire series yet so maybe this is made explicit in Season 4, but so far there isn't any clear indication of where anybody lives. So I decided the LITs and Eve live off campus, as it were, and Jenkins lives in the Annex. 
> 
> This doesn't quite fit with the fact that when the all first arrive at the Annex, the hall is covered in cobwebs, suggesting it hadn't been opened for a long time - unless Jenkins hasn't actually left the Annex at that point for several years, which I suppose is possible!


	3. Santa's Midnight Run

Things went relatively smoothly for the next couple of months. They fell into a routine – cases, training, rest. Eve met with Jenkins once or twice a week to talk about their progress, and he made remarkably insightful comments about the kind of exercises that might be helpful for each of them. She reported on interests that she’d heard them talk about, and Jenkins quietly went about finding books that might suit. She found herself thinking of him as a fellow soldier, although she didn’t know for sure that he ever had been. He was a good strategist and equally good at following orders when she needed him to. He reminded her of the Command Sergeant Major at her first posting when she’d joined the Army – an old, grizzled, grumpy man who had kept things running without fuss. He’d known everyone’s names, knew what was happening in their personal lives, was always one step ahead of new missions and new protocols, and he’d been so indispensable that when he finally died from a heart attack, the CO actually cried.

Jenkins held himself separate from the rest of them, rarely joining them in social gatherings unless explicitly asked to. To keep him connected, Eve took to wandering by his lab at night to say goodbye, when everyone else had gone home, though true to her word, she never went back to his personal chambers. Jenkins started preparing tea and snacks on research and training days, and his constant tinkering with the backdoor paid off – it got more stable and robust over time, and had the bonus effect of giving Cassandra an endless source of joy as she contributed to the math that helped build on each improvement.

All in all, Eve thought, as fall gave way to winter, even though they were routinely getting into scrapes they barely got back out of, things were going relatively well. Thanksgiving came and went, and suddenly she realized that their first Christmas as a team was upon them.

She was not a fan of Christmas – quite the opposite, in fact. She’d have loved nothing more than to avoid it altogether. The leader in her knew that she should be taking advantage – holidays were great team bonding experiences, especially Christmas where gift-giving was involved. But she really didn’t want to.

So, when she came into the library on the morning of Christmas Eve and discovered that the entire Annex had been decorated, she was secretly relieved that someone else had stepped up. “Oh, no,” she exclaimed, glad that she got to play the role of Grinch instead of spreader of Christmas joy, “we have to do this here?”

It turned out, all three of her trainees liked Christmas, although Cassandra was clearly the leader of the decorating. It did not miss Eve’s attention that Jenkins seemed as uncomfortable with the Christmas spirit as she felt, and that he got the hell out as soon as possible. But only moments later he came back into the main room, hauling along a pay phone, engrossed in conversation. He looked worried. Eve dropped the papers she was shuffling, giving him her attention. She noticed out of the corner of her eye that the trainees had followed suit.

“Christmas is cancelled,” he announced, wringing his hands.

“Thank you!” Eve exclaimed, smiling, but Jenkins didn’t banter.

“No, I mean, Christmas is cancelled for the whole world, and soon after, the whole world will be cancelled because Santa Claus has disappeared. Follow me.”

Cassandra ran faster than Eve had ever seen her move. She slumped against the desk momentarily. _Of course, there would be a Christmas case_ , she thought. There would have to be, wouldn’t there? She grumped through Jenkins’ inevitable explanation, taking every opportunity to announce that she refused to call… whatever the mystical being was, Santa Claus. Jenkins huffed in impatience; he was clearly upset, and she knew she had to rope in the snark. He’d done everything she’d asked him to, and he’d never asked for anything, before this.

“Still not calling him Santa Claus,” she declared to the now-empty room, before turning and following. Jenkins was already striding down the hallway toward the back door, looking as frantic as she’d ever seen him, and the trainees were fairly running in his wake.

+++

Cassandra and Stone went to London while Jones pulled up surveillance. When the team came back together, Stone reported that Santa had been grabbed by the Serpent Brotherhood. Cassandra, meanwhile, reacted to an image Jones had found.

“It’s him,” she said.

“Him who?” Jones asked.

“From the Serpent Brotherhood. You all met Lamia but I’m the only one who met him. He’s the boss. Um… Dulaque.”

Eve’s head jerked up at the sound of breaking glass. She looked up to see Jenkins visibly reining in anger. “Of course,” he muttered.

“Uh, quick question, Jenkins?” She asked. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Jenkins answered, “If Dulaque and the Serpent Brotherhood have Santa, at least we know what happens next. Dulaque kills him. He kills Santa Claus.”

They jumped into action. It was only long minutes after, when he had disappeared back into the bowels of the Annex, that Eve realized Jenkins had never explained who Dulaque was, how he knew him, or why the man would make him react so violently that he’d actually break something. She’d watched the big man shelter the smallest, most fragile artifact in his large hands without even so much as a crack – he knew how to control his motions. For him to actually lose control… well, there was definitely something there.

Of course, as per usual, there was no time to figure it out, because Cassandra and Stone had determined where the Serpent Brotherhood were holed up in London, and it was time to go.

+++

Santa, as it turned out, was really, really annoying. He talked in the third person, he was smug, he… knew things about her. And, bonus, he changed between incarnations. Jenkins explained it over speaker phone when she called him from the truck she stole.

“Hey,” she said, once she had a tenuous grasp of the situation, “Don’t be Nicholas.” Just like that, Santa shook off the persona, reverting to the one she’d originally met.

Santa filled in some of the explanation. “Tell Jenkins that Santa has been poisoned,” he said, oblivious to the fact that Jenkins could hear him. He went on to explain that he was missing his talisman, his hat.

“The hat?” Jenkins broke in. “Wait -he doesn’t have his hat?”

“I gave it to Ezekiel,” Eve admitted, with a sinking feeling. “Will it affect him?”

Jenkins did something Eve had never thought she’d get to experience.

He laughed.

+++

Santa ho-ho-ho’d. He hummed. He withheld important information, like about how he could manipulate the laws of physics. By the time he turbo-charged the old truck to British Columbia, she was about ready to kill him.

“Why aren’t we at the North Pole?” she asked Jenkins over the phone.

Santa shrugged. “We’re out of gas.”

+++

And to top it all off, her trainees – and Jenkins – were busy solving the problem and figuring out how to save the world without her, while she stood on the side of a secondary highway, babysitting a powerful eccentric immortal. God, she hated Christmas. Cassandra had taken over the big picture problem-solving and Jenkins had taken over the planning, and there was nothing left for her to do except trudge through the countryside with a guy who kept putting his nose in her business.

Santa concluded his little trip into her psyche by pointing out, “Maybe that’s why Colonel Baird feels like she has no place where she belongs. But as long as you’re with other people, you belong. The entire human race belongs together.”

That was too much. She swung around, stopping Santa in his tracks. “All those Christmases I was in places that completely disprove that theory. I was there because people were fighting, hurting each other, doing things that I – that they – that nobody could ever make right. On Christmas.”

“Colonel Baird is correct. A human action, once taken, can never be changed. But a human heart, that can always be changed.”

It was a low blow. She resisted the urge to punch him. “Town’s up ahead.”

“Ho, ho,” he said.

+++

Proving her theory that Christmas blew chunks, Santa got drunk and sucked her and Stone into a bar fight, and then they got to the airport to discover that Jones had sent their pilot away in a fit of Christmas cheer. And then Dulaque and Lamia showed up in Santa’s sleigh and Santa fainted and everything went sideways. They got rid of Lamia and she disabled Dulaque, but at the risk of nearly losing him. Stumbling to the front of the plane, she grabbed him by the hand.

“Tell me how to help Nick,” she demanded.

“Or what?” he shot back, smiling. “You’ll let go? Colonel Baird, I know something you don’t.”

“I know I’m holding you in this plane,” she answered.

“To what end?” He asked and let go, laughing as he fell. Eve couldn’t drag her eyes away, watching him disappear until the hatch starting closing.

Then she was rushing to save them all because Santa was too busy puking to fly. Jones and Cassandra, as was typical, stood uselessly in the cargo hold. Stone, also as typical, followed her to the cockpit. “Wanna help me out?” she asked.

“Yeah. How?”

“Google ‘how to lower landing gear’.”

+++

Her survival training kicked in. First, get them out of immediate danger of dying in a plane crash. Then get them out of danger of freezing to death. She left orders for heat, light, and contact with home base. Then Santa explained that he couldn’t do his job; he was too weak. It seemed like it was all over.

“We need a new vessel,” he explained. “Someone else must channel the power. Someone else must be the Santa for just this night. But there’s no guarantee that a mortal will survive.” Stone volunteered. Santa shot him down. “We need someone more attuned to the night. Someone more bound to Christmas.” Cassandra volunteered. Then Jones. But Santa just plowed on. “There is no one here more in tune with Christmas than the baby born on the last stroke of midnight, so named by her parents as the girl born on Christmas…”

“Eve.” Eve said her own name, finally accepting. She reached for Santa.

“You will probably not survive,” he warned.

“I think I can survive spreading around some good will,” she answered.

Santa looked surprised. “Good will? Who told you?” Then realization dawned. “Jenkins. But he never really understood. When a person commits an act of goodwill, it does not just create more. It transforms into something better – into a gift for their fellow man. So, I give you, Eve Baird, all of humanity’s goodwill. Now go and give them back the gift of hope.”

+++

She was everywhere. Everywhere. With everyone. With every failure. Every fear. Every crisis. She was there. She landed in Stone’s arms.

+++

Later that day, back in the Annex, she found Jenkins shadowing her steps as she wandered through the library, nattering on about everything, every detail, all out of order, pouring it out of her and onto him without even stopping to think about whether it was right or fair. “I just can’t believe Dulaque would kill himself,” she finally found herself saying, coming to the end of the long list of things that were bothering her.

“Dulaque,” Jenkins repeated, speaking for the first time. “Die from falling out of a plane? Huh – we’re – uh, he’s much tougher than that. And speaking of tough, Santa is making a full recovery.”

Eve contemplated that stumble. He said ‘ _we’re_ ’, she thought. But she let it go. “Tell Nick I said hi,” she answered. They slid into banter. They came around the corner of the mezzanine and the trainees all hollered, ‘surprise!’ She glanced at Jenkins, finally cottoning on to the fact that he’d been guiding her like a sheepdog away from the main room all this time. He grinned as she took in the ‘happy birthday’ banner, the cake, and the presents. When she looked back up, he was gone again.

+++

Her fledglings eventually all headed back to their separate abodes, but Eve wasn’t quite ready to go. _He said, ‘we’re,’_ she thought. _He actually broke a glass when he discovered Dulaque was the head of the Serpent Brotherhood._ There were things there, dark things, that she needed to address.

He wasn’t in his lab. She went to his room and knocked on the door. There was silence for a long moment, and she was just beginning to think he wouldn’t let her in when the door swung open, squeaking on its hinges. The man that stood before her was… sad. Old. He had a drink in his hand, and it wasn’t tea.

“May I come in?” she asked.

Jenkins looked at her for a long time, searching her face for something. Then he cleared his throat. “Do you remember, Colonel Baird, what you said to me the last time you came to my chambers?” She nodded, but he continued as though she hadn’t. “You said you respected my autonomy. You said I could say ‘no’. Colonel Baird,” He leaned down to hold her gaze, tension in every muscle of his face. “I’m saying no.”

Her first instinct was to protest. She swallowed it. “All right,” she said, taking a step back.

The stern expression on his face melted back into sadness. “All right?” he repeated.

“I meant what I said, Jenkins,” she promised.

He nodded, clearing his throat again, looking down at the floor, then at the drink in his hand, then over her shoulder at the wall. “I’m not – ready,” he admitted quietly.

“I get it.”

“Merry Christmas, Colonel.” It was a dismissal. Jenkins was turning back toward his room.

But – after all those crises, all those desperate moments – she couldn’t leave him like this. So, she said, “Wait, Jenkins – just one question.”

She could see him brace himself as he lifted his eyes to hers.

“What’s this I hear about an apron?” she asked, and smiled, trying to pour all her sympathy and understanding into the expression. She held her breath, waiting.

For a moment Jenkins looked conflicted, then confused. Then, just as when they’d first met, he gave way, and smiled back. “Colonel – Eve,” he said, stepping back into the room and easing the door open just a little wider. “Would you care to join me for a drink?”

“As long as it’s not eggnog,” she replied.


	4. The Apple of Discord

Flynn came back in the spring. She should have known better than to expect he would show up on a slow day, or that he’d just drop by for a visit, but Eve couldn’t help feel a small stab of disappointment when the first thing he said to her, catching her eye, was “Guardian.” Not ‘I missed you’, or ‘how are you’ or even ‘hello’. She wasn’t going to let him know it stung, though, so she just nodded back and used his formal title in response.

Of course, once he was there, he didn’t slow down enough to notice her frustration. He did shut up long enough for Jenkins to compare dragons to hip hop artists – and don’t think for a moment that she’d missed the little comment about being paid in full, she’d be coming back to _that_ one day – but then he was back into full boss mode, barking out orders to her trainees, to Jenkins, and to her.

Well, she was having none of that. When he wouldn’t stop, she literally grabbed his lips and held them closed. “We have to talk,” she told him, and dragged him from the room. Once they were alone, it still took her a few minutes to get him to stop babbling long enough to hear her concern. “Jenkins, myself and the others, we’re a solid machine here now. You left the annex in good hands. My hands, remember?”

“Of course, I remember – you and your hands,” he replied. “They’re lovely.” He took them in his and kissed them one at a time. There was that little spark of chemistry between them again, and it brought a smile to her face. But she wasn’t going to let him sweet-talk his way out of undermining her authority, and she said as much.

She had just got him to slow down enough that he might actually answer a question when the doorbell rang. That was weird.

“When did the annex get a doorbell?” she asked.

“Oh, dear.”

+++

She had to get on board real fast after that. First there was the fact that Jones, her least polished, most impulsive trainee, was going to have to deal with the lawyers. Then there was the fact that their door opened into the Vatican and she bumped elbows with a man she was pretty sure was the pope. And then they were climbing down into a creepy underground passage.

Just to survive the mission, she had to stop being surprised by things. So, through force of will, the fact that she got directions from a dragon didn’t phase her. The fact that she had to pull her NATO ID to stop museum security from shooting Stone didn’t phase her. But Cassandra giggling madly before stealing her gun out of her holster… that phased her – especially when they found Lamia with a broken wrist, gasping in pain, and Cassandra’s dress on the floor.

“What did you do with Cassandra?” Eve demanded.

Lamia gave her a dirty look. “Not the question,” she wheezed. “The question is, what can your girl do with a power plant?” Eve’s heart sank. They rushed to the plant just in time to hear Cassandra spouting a bunch of numbers, and she thought for sure they were sunk, but then Stone figured out how to break Cassandra out of her weird hyper-manic math spiral, and the apple fell from her hand. Eve raced down the hall after it, Flynn at her heels.

Then… she wasn’t sure exactly what happened. They were fighting… but also kind of flirting… but mostly fighting. And she came out on top. She’d never felt so powerful before. She was right and she was strong and god damn it he was going to listen this time. Holding her gun in one hand and the apple in the other, she finally, _finally_ had his attention. “I have the responsibility. I get the command,” she shouted. “And you all need to follow orders!”

Something slammed into her and she flew to the ground. Lamia. She had a knife raised, and then she didn’t, and then Flynn was screaming about being a god. Eve tried to talk him down, but all he did was look her up and down and say, “Last chance, Eve. You and me and all the magic in the world? But bring something that shows a little skin, for once. No? Ciao.”

She regrouped with Cassandra and Jake who had, thankfully, managed to shut down the power plant, and got back to the Annex, cutting Flynn off mid-rant. He screamed for them to get out, and Jenkins, who was seated at the table, grabbed Jones by the sweater and pulled him to his feet immediately, so Eve took her cue from him, letting them be herded into the hallway. _When in doubt, trust your Sergeant Major_ , she thought.

“I’m the librarian,” she heard Flynn say as they caught their breath. “Not that broken-down chicken little and not his highly overrated criminal companion. Me.” They watched together as he went completely off the rails. Eve felt her head spinning. She could hardly understand what Flynn was saying, let alone figure out what to do about it.

Fortunately, Jenkins was a bit more composed. “The best offense is really just a good offense,” he said, tapping Jones on the shoulder. They approached the librarian, who turned his ire on Jenkins, until suddenly he just… stopped screaming. Flynn did an abrupt about-face, coming down from his rage in a matter of seconds.

Jenkins and Jones wandered back to the door. Jones was tossing something up and down – the apple. “You pickpocketed the apple?”

“Yeah. Jenkins distracted him. Pretty neat.” Jenkins gave him a nod.

“Are you evil?” Cassandra asked.

“No, don’t feel any different.”

“Are you immune?” Stone hypothesized, then immediately answered his own question. “No. He’s already –”

“The worst version of himself,” Eve finished, cluing in.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Jones said.

“What were you thinking?” Eve asked, turning her attention to Jenkins.

He looked surprised to be put on the spot. “Uh, I was… actually just thinking that I now appreciate the advantage of having both a librarian and a thief.” And they sauntered away. She continued to stand there, gaping, as Ezekiel solved the mystery and salvaged the conclave.

+++

Flynn’s apology came in the form of transfer papers, to make her position official. It was better than flowers. “What brought this on?” she asked.

“I didn’t give you a choice,” he acknowledged. “I met you, I recruited you, I gave you a job, and then… I took off. And that’s no way – that’s not, that’s… I want to treat you like an equal.” _Gee_ , she thought, _where have I heard that before?_ It was kind of ironic, Flynn making the same mistake with her that she’d made with, well, everybody.

“Well, you’re out of practice being with people,” she said, going back to the reorganizing she’d been doing. She wasn’t sure if she was still angry with him, or if it just cut too close to home. 

“Well, I’m out of practice being a person,” he responded. “But you – you’ve really built something here. I mean Stone knows Cassandra well enough to help her with her visions; Ezekiel Jones and Jenkins working together, are you kidding me?”

“Right?” She was feeling pretty proud of that one. She’d been working hard on her relationship with Jenkins and it was paying off in spades.

“It’s because they listen to you, and you’re doing the job. This is your space now, not mine.” She made a joke about the desk, but he plowed on. “I guess what I’m trying to say is, I’ll stay if you stay.”

And there he was, finally, saying the words she’d wanted to hear since he’d gotten back – that he was back, that he was staying, that there’d be a chance for them to explore this thing between them. That he was willing. And as soon as he said them, she knew it wasn’t right.

“I’ll stay,” she said, signing the papers. “But you go.” He looked at her, hurt. “Go back out.” She walked him to the door. “Go finish your mission,” she said.

“Are you sure, are you really sure?” he asked, his eyes searching her face.

“Absolutely. If there’s one thing I know, it’s when a mission’s not done, and yours just isn’t.”

And then he kissed her, taking her breath away. And just when she was going to change her mind, he disappeared.

+++

Everyone else was gone when she got back to the Annex, except Jenkins. He had tea for him and an ice-cold beer for her set out on a corner of the Annex table. He smiled when she walked in the room and pulled a chair out for her before sitting down himself. “So,” he said, “You sent him away.”

She nodded, sighing. “I did.” She took a drink.

“It’s not always easy, doing the right thing.” Eve glanced up at him. He was fiddling with the handle of his teacup, eyes cast downward, shoulders hunched.

“Jenkins,” she said, remembering how severely he’d reacted to just the name ‘Dulaque’ and imagining how much more intensely he must be reacting now. He glanced up and she could see the panic in his eyes. “I’m not going to ask,” she followed up, quickly changing tactics, and was relieved to see him relax, sighing. “I just want you to know – if you ever do want to talk about it – I’m here.” He smiled briefly, and then leaned back and cleared his throat. She quickly changed the subject, sensing that even the slightest step down that path could overwhelm the old man. “So – how did you know that Jones wouldn’t be affected by the apple?”

He shrugged. “The boy’s already incorrigible,” he said gruffly, but Eve heard the undercurrent of affection in his tone and grinned broadly.

“You like him,” she teased. “Admit it.”

“I’ll do no such thing,” he answered back, but his tone was equally light. Their eyes met and she laughed out loud, feeling the tension slide out of her body.

She took another sip, and another, until the bottle was done, and she had a nice buzz. He set his cup down and braced his hands on the table, and she knew he was about to leave. “Wait,” she said seriously. There was one more thing she had to say. He settled back down, watchful. “I just – I just wanted you know, what Flynn said – Jenkins, I don’t think you’re a charity case.” The words Flynn had thrown around while under the influence had cut into her; she could only imagine how a proud man like Jenkins must have felt.

To her surprise, Jenkins just smiled. “Flynn doesn’t know everything,” he replied. She cocked her head, eyebrows lifting, and Jenkins indulged her with an explanation, of sorts. “As I said before, Colonel Baird, I’m paid in full.”

“Cryptic and annoying,” she replied, looking at him sideways. He just gave a little bow.

“There’s more in the wine cellar, behind the ancient Roman stacks,” Jenkins said, pointing at the bottle. “If you want another. Do not tell Stone.”

+++

The thing with the dragons had fall-out. Initially things seemed okay – everyone showed up by 10am the next morning, as was routine, for the mission debrief. Jenkins set down drinks. Then Cassandra burst into tears, her small frame wracked with sobs as she recounted how twisted her thinking had been. “You’re never going to trust me again,” she wailed.

It took the better part of an hour to calm her down, and Stone’s embarrassed deflecting didn’t help. Eve wasn’t sure whether he was more upset that he’d been affected by the apple or that he hadn’t done anything grandiose while affected, but he was angry and sullen throughout, making biting remarks that set Cassandra off even more.

And Jones, predictably, wandered off. Eve gave Jenkins a pleading look. He sighed, but stood and headed into the stacks, propelling Jones back with one hand on his shoulder a few minutes later. Jones, of course, was ridiculously smug because he’d, in his words, “saved the world by being a thief,” and it was only when Jenkins pointed out that the plan had been his that Jones finally shut up.

And, to his credit, once he’d stopped talking about himself, he was able to contribute a bit more meaningfully to the conversation, patting Cassandra on the arm and telling her it was okay.

“You didn’t try to blow up Italy!” she wailed back.

“Nah, but you didn’t actually do it,” he pointed out.

“Only because Jake stopped me.”

“Right, but that’s the point, isn’t it? We’ve got each other’s backs.” Jones looked to Stone for affirmation and the other man huffed a little but nodded. Another six minutes of conversation, and Stone made a conciliatory remark to Cassandra, and Jenkins declared that it was lunch time and disappeared.

A break was definitely in order, and she’d had about as much as she could take from the trio, so she joined him in the kitchen. Surprisingly, when he saw her, he stiffened. “What is it?” she asked.

He turned from the cutting block where he’d been preparing crudités, his eyes wide. “Jones didn’t tell you?” he asked.

“The only thing Jones has talked about so far is how he saved the day,” she answered.

“Well yes, I mean – but he didn’t tell you how he… talked me into…” he floundered and broke off.

“Jenkins, what is it?” she asked, totally confused. She stepped up and settled one hand over his, stilling the knife. He seemed so flustered she was afraid he might cut off a finger. “Will you tell me?” she asked, trying to remind him he had a choice.

He hesitated, then nodded. “As you have no doubt surmised, Colonel, Dulaque and I have… history.” _Yeah, no shit_ , she thought, and her face must have showed it, because he rolled his eyes and hurried on. “Suffice it to say… Flynn wasn’t wrong to call me ‘chicken little’. When Dulaque appeared in the library, I – I left.”

Eve felt her face heat up in anger. “You left.” Jenkins looked away, shame clear on his face. “You left as in, never coming back?” Her voice rose. Jenkins nodded, eyes sliding shut. “You left Ezekiel Jones at the conclave table and… what? Ran away?”

He flinched, briefly, then stood still as a statue, as though he were waiting for her to strike him.

“Jenkins,” she stepped back, throwing up her hands in exasperation. “You need to…” She could hear her voice shaking and she stopped, taking a deep breath, and then another, until she felt like she had control again. _Equal to equal_ , she reminded herself. “Why did you come back?”

“Mr. Jones. He, uh… persuaded me.”

“Jones.” Jenkins nodded. “Convinced you to stay.” He nodded again, a picture of misery.

Eve laughed, the anger draining out of her. She saw Jenkins staring at her, pure shock on his face, but she couldn’t help herself. “No wonder he’s so insufferable today!” she exclaimed. The pieces were starting to click together.

Jenkins smiled faintly. He set down the knife and turned to her, smoothing down the front of his shirt and pulling on his lapels. “Colonel Baird, I – I…” He cleared his throat, shifting his weight between his feet, staring at her left ear. “I can assure you that…”

“No, you can’t,” she answered. She’d seen this kind of thing before. There were no guarantees what people would do when they were terrified. He looked wounded by her words. She said, gently, “Jenkins, please look at me.” Reluctantly, he did so. She took a deep breath, holding his gaze. “Jenkins, it’s okay.”

“I – it most certainly is not!” he sputtered.

“You got scared – I don’t know why, and I respect that you’re not ready to tell me why. You got scared. You made a mistake. And your teammate came through for you. It happened to all of us.”

“It’s hardly the same, Colonel. You were under the influence of the apple of discord while I –”

“Were under the influence of something else.” He looked away, jaw tensing. “Fear is a very powerful force, Jenkins.”

“Especially when one is a coward,” he replied bitterly.

“Cowards don’t come back,” she shot back. He glanced up at her, and for a moment there was such depth of emotion in his dark eyes that she thought she might cry if he wouldn’t. But then he heaved a mighty sigh and shook his head.

“Well, I suppose I am just fortunate that Mr. Jones is as persistent as he is,” he replied, turning his attention back to the meal preparation.

“Believe me, Jenkins, everyone’s pride is taking a hit on the fact that Jones saved the day,” she answered, and was rewarded by the sight of his posture loosening up. They fell into less serious conversation as she helped him tidy up the kitchen.

Just before they picked up the trays to deliver to their trainees, though, she stopped him with a hand on his arm. “Just one thing, Jenkins,” she said.

“Anything,” he said quietly, not making eye contact.

“If you ever get to that place again, where you feel like you need to go – please wait until you can tell me, and let’s have a conversation about it first. Can you do that for me?”

He swallowed hard, and then nodded wordlessly. Something tight in her chest let go and she breathed deeply. She made to move away but was stilled suddenly by his other hand coming to lie over hers, and squeezing tight, just for a second. Then he cleared his throat and she found herself having to blink rapidly to clear her vision, and they both quickly grabbed the trays and got the hell out of the kitchen.

+++

It was when she was tossing and turning in bed that night, trying to settle into sleep, that she realized that Dulaque had fallen out of a plane, and then three months later shown up at the library’s front door, and according to Jenkins, let himself in. She hadn’t really believed Jenkins until now that Dulaque could have survived a fall like that. _And Jenkins said ‘we’re’_ , a voice whispered in her head.

She sent Flynn a text that he didn’t respond to. She sent him a voicemail that he didn’t reply to. She wished he’d answer. There was something deep going on here, and she had no idea what it was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, I haven't seen Season 4, so maybe there is an explanation during that season for how Jenkins came to be at the library. But I dislike the idea that he was, as Flynn called it, straightforwardly a "charity case" so I decided to ignore that remark. When I finish season 4, assuming no explanation is forthcoming, I think I'll write my own How Jenkins came to the Library story, and I can assure you he'll be quite heroic ;)


	5. The Fables of Doom

Jones’ unbearable attitude continued well into the next few weeks, and he was still riding the high of being the hero when the clippings book sent them to, as he put it, “Bumblefart, Washington” to investigate a traffic accident.

Jenkins was also in fine insufferable form, as it turned out. When they called him, he was at his cryptic best. “It might be a troll,” he said.

“A troll,” Jones repeated.

“Why, yes,” Jenkins answered. “I understand your skepticism, Mr. Jones. Trolls are not indigenous to the Pacific Northwest.” Eve smothered a smile at Jones’s epic eye roll because, yeah, sure, that was the part that Jones was having a hard time with. “But,” Jenkins carried on, oblivious to their reaction, “with the return of magic to the world all sorts of odd things are waking up.” His eyes had that little gleam that Eve was starting to recognize as immediately preceding the moment that Jenkins decided to fuck with them. “And if indeed it is a troll you’re facing, well…” his tone was matter of fact, but he couldn’t quite hide his smirk. “It’s not been nice knowing you, per se.”

Oh, if she could reach through the tablet, she’d smack his fat face, Eve thought, but she kept her cool. “How do we fight a troll?” she asked, the picture of patience.

“You don’t,” Jenkins replied, almost happily. “You flee – or you die, quickly.” And then he got to the punchline. “But, if you could get me a picture, or a sample to analyze, I, I could identify the species and find a weakness.”

Damn it, she knew she was falling into a trap here, but… “Correct me if I’m wrong,” she said, “But subduing a troll to get a sample might be a little… tricky?”

Yup, she knew it. He was smiling, the smug bastard. “I’ll be happy to correct you, Colonel,” he said. “You’re wrong.” She sighed. “Trolls are nothing but subdued, in daylight.” He waved goodbye and walked away.

Of course, he couldn’t have just started with ‘trolls are subdued in daylight,’ she thought, sharing an exasperated glance with Stone. But, she couldn’t deny, it was better to hear him smug and happy than afraid and despondent, like he had been after seeing Dulaque. It had taken the big man several days to get back to equilibrium, even if he was good at hiding his disquiet. Honestly, they had all needed a change of pace. And this mission might allow her to repair some things that were broken on her team.

In that vein, she sent Cassandra and Jake off in search of surveillance footage, rolling right over Cassandra’s protest. The two hadn’t been right either since the whole apple of discord thing; the fragile trust they had been building had taken a huge hit. And Jones seemed to think that one good save meant he never had to work again, so she grabbed him by his collar and steered him toward the bridge.

He gave her a lot of attitude right up until the moment that they actually found the troll.

+++

Shit got weird when they regrouped. It started with Stone killing a really big wolf in a bonnet. “Someone has weaponized fairy tales?” she asked. The three trainees shrugged.

“Back to the Annex?” Jones suggested.

“Back to the Annex,” she agreed. She called Jenkins on her cell and reported in as they made their way back to the door. By the time they went through, he had his chalkboard set up and pre-populated with all the magical things that could weaponize fairy tales. Then he started crossing them off systematically. Eve shifted her weight from foot to foot, trying to be patient, certain that Jenkins could have just excluded all those things in the first place. She couldn’t tell if he was showing off or just being fastidious, and an idle part of her mind wondered whether he had developed a touch of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, living all these years in the Annex alone.

 _And how many years had that been?_ She wondered, but as usual there was little time to ponder the big questions because they needed to attend to the matter at hand. “Loose nukes, nerve gas, I know how to find. Where do we even start here?”

Jenkins thought a moment, just long enough for her to conclude that he hadn’t been showing off. He was no longer fucking with them, just engaged in the work. “Autopsy,” he suggested.

“Autopsy on who?”

“Why, the giant dead wolf, of course. Bring it back here.”

“Bring it back here,” Stone repeated. “You want us to move a giant dead wolf through town and put it through a magical door.”

Jenkins gave him his world-class ‘duh’ look.

“No problem!” Stone finished, scoffing.

“Wait,” Cassandra said, “Where did that wolf end up?”

Eve threw her head back like she was in pain. How on earth was she going to enquire about this one, without seeming like she was totally insane?

+++

Distracting the people at the bar while Jones and Stone moved the wolf gave her an opportunity to assure Cassandra about Stone, at least, although there was a gaggle of women who seemed to be oddly taken with Cassandra that were pretty distracting themselves. Eve was glad when the phone rang.

“A what? Stone pulled a what out of the wolf?” she exclaimed moments later, hanging up in a hurry. “C’mon, Cassie, we’ve gotta go,” she said, grabbing the other woman’s hand.

“Little Red Riding Hood?” Cassandra guessed as they hustled back to the Annex.

“Apparently,” they stumbled through the door to find Stone with his arms wrapped around a shaking dark-haired young woman. Jones was fairly bouncing off the walls. Jenkins, predictably, was serving tea.

+++

Jenkins surprised Eve by joining them when they brought the woman to the hospital. He didn’t explain why, but Eve was glad for the extra support – until they actually got there. For some reason, the girl had attached herself to Cassandra and had become quite convinced that the redhead had saved her; much to Stone’s frustration. And Jones continued to harass the local sheriff, making himself useful by weaving plausible cover stories one minute and then pushing the boundary between useful and about-to-be-arrested the next. And Jenkins? Jenkins spent several minutes studying the snack machine.

“I adore these,” he said, knocking on the plexiglass when the group finally tracked him down. “It’s like a miniature apartment. And, if you hit the right numbers, the occupant of your choice leaps to his death!” He clapped like a delighted child. “And becomes your snack.”

“You don’t get out much, do you?” Eve said.

“Nah,” he answered. “Only when necessary.” And then she started to understand. The book was concerning to Jenkins, and his goofy behaviour was how he masked his anxiety. This was a different kind of anxious than she’d seen from him before. Before, with them arriving at the Annex, with Dulaque – it had been personal, something tearing at an old wound. But this was ‘big picture’ – this was the mission. Her Sergeant Major was in the field.

+++

Things went well for a while. She and Stone sighted the books at the local library. Cassandra and Jenkins concluded that the book hadn’t reached its full power yet, and Jenkins headed back to the Annex to do some additional research. Yep, things were going well except for the part where she had somehow failed to give Jones any instructions whatsoever, which was a weird oversight for her, one which she regretted an hour later when they all met up at the bar and Jones promptly got arrested by the Sheriff who, the next moment, turned into the wolf from the three little pigs. She was starting to lose the plot. The fledglings were arguing about what to do next and she just couldn’t get this song out of her head… it was just stuck in there, maybe if she just…

“Eve, what’re you doing? Are you humming?” Stone demanded.

“What?”

“You were just humming.”

“No, I wasn’t.” Was she? She hadn’t meant to…

“Alright look, this is strange. Alright, Cassandra’s like a, a chick magnet and Baird, I’m pretty sure that hair is not army regulation.”

Eve glanced down at her hair. It was longer, and blonder, than it had been before. But before she could wrap her head around that, Stone had an axe in his hand. And then an owl on his arm.

“Okay,” she said, pulling out her phone. “Jenkins, quick question…”

By the time he finished explaining that they were all doomed, Jones was gone. And Jenkins, weirdly, hung up on them. So much for her field officer, she thought bleakly.

+++

She lost the plot again. One minute she was flipping her hair – now down to the small of her back – out of her face and urgently trying to explain to Jones that he was the only person the fairytale worked for, not against; the next, she was watching Cassandra make a passionate speech about winning and all she could think was how absolutely wonderful the other woman was, and how Cassandra would save them all. She batted her eyes at Cassandra.

“Hey!” Stone whispered urgently, and she came to, recognizing with a shock that there was a brawl about to start.

Stone made the first move. Cassandra waited for the wolves to come to her. Eve did her best to fight, but suddenly she found herself in glittery two-inch heels. “Change the story!” she screamed at Jones. It wasn’t working. They were taking them out, one by one by one.

And then the exact reverse was happening. Stone found his feet, Eve got her groove back, using moves she had never even learned before, and Cassandra… well, that was a bit concerning. She was using magic. But it was working for them, so Eve decided not to worry about it too much just yet.

They walked the poor Sheriff out of the library, giving him the lamest explanation ever for what had happened, meeting Jones in the street. He had the book, so they made their excuses and got the hell out. Jenkins was waiting for them, inventorying a pile of books on his table. _So that’s what he’d gotten up to_ , she thought. Jones handed the magic book over to Jenkins and Eve felt herself relax; it was finally in the right hands.

And ugh – Jones had saved the day again. “I’m going to go punch something,” Eve said.

“Right behind you,” Stone replied.


	6. The Rule of Three

They’d earned some R&R, Eve thought. So, after they debriefed the fairy tale mission and finished cataloguing all the new books, she gave everyone the day off. The trio seemed happy enough to have the time, and she made sure to follow up with Jenkins in particular, encouraging him to get out of the Annex and enjoy some time out in the world. He’d agreed – or at least she thought he’d agreed. But when she snuck into the Annex, looking forward to a bit of quiet time to do some analysis of possible threats, try to get a leg up on the danger, he was there when she walked in. _Cool_ , she thought, _so basically anytime I tell him to do something he doesn’t want to, he’s just going to lie to me and do what he wants anyway._

The second she started talking to him, it was like a magnet effect. Stone came wandering down the staircase, coffee in one hand and a massive tome in another. He tossed his book down on Jenkins’ table, rearranging things, just as Cassandra came running into the room looking for pens. Her request discharged, Jenkins deigned to give Stone a dirty look before asking, “Why are you blighting me today?”

“I’m researching magical threats. I’m a little sick of blindly fighting minotaurs and giant trolls.” As if on cue, the door powered up. Eve grabbed her gun. From beyond the door, an alarm sounded. She cocked her pistol.

Jones walked through the door, breathing heavily, grinning. His smile fell off his face as he turned around and saw Eve there. “Why is everybody here?” he asked. “Isn’t it our day off?” Eve sighed.

Jones was just launching into an excuse about the painting he was holding when the clippings book wiggled – rumbled, really, floating into the air before slamming back onto its stand. They gathered around and read the invitation. “What the hell is a STEM fair?” Eve wondered.

“STEM?” Cassandra’s voice sounded behind them. She was literally vibrating with excitement. _Oh god_ , Eve thought. It was going to be a nerd case.

+++

Cassandra was so excited that Eve thought she might wet her pants. And it didn’t get any better when they introduced themselves as librarians and ended up being judges. God, Eve was bored. That was, at least, until she found a good old-fashioned baking soda volcano that exploded into real fire. She was hopeful initially that it would be relatively easy fix, but when they pulled the student whose project exploded in for questioning, it became clear that things were more complicated. Complicated enough that Jenkins wandered through the door again, once again without adequate explanation. He shortly had Eve and Stone dispatched, seeking a coven.

Instead of a coven, they found a geeky little blonde boy trying to invite a nerdy little science girl to prom. They hoofed it back to the gym just in time to see a young man… expel… a lot of flies. From his mouth. They regrouped back at the Annex, where Jenkins had gone ahead. He was fiddling with some steampunk little whatsit as he explained the ‘how’. Cassandra supplied the ‘why’: “When I was in school, if someone had given me a magic wand or a spell that would help me win a STEM fair or get into a good college, I would have used it.”

“But where do a bunch of science kids get a magic focus?” Stone asked.

“Well, it’s like tracking a WMD,” Eve replied. “Figure out who’s using it, track it back to the source. We need intel on all the kids who might be involved, but from a source who isn’t part of the suspect pool.”

“I got this,” Stone replied.

+++

Stone came through like a champ, giving them their first solid lead: an app. Amazingly, Jenkins had a computer in the lab somewhere – well, sort of. It was attached to a typewriter. But it was working. Between the two of them, Jenkins and Jones put together what they were looking at, and Eve was once more impressed by their ability to collaborate. They were one step closer. They sent Cassandra in to interrogate Amy, the science girl, and moved one more step closer still.

Then Jenkins called. And called again. “Colonel, you must come back to the Annex immediately,” he interrupted when she started to explain.

“What right now?”

“Yes. Now.” He was a bit breathless, sounding more frantic than he’d been at Christmas when Santa disappeared.

“Okay, okay,” she said. The others gave her a funny look, so she clarified, as she hung up, “Jenkins is freaking out about something.”

Cassandra captured her attention. “If all of those kids are using that spell against each other, then a giant feedback loop is building inside that STEM fair.”

“Okay,” she replied. There was a knot building in her stomach. “I’ll handle Jenkins. You make sure those kids don’t turn this school into a smoking crater.” She took off, worry building, constricting her breath.

When she got to the door, her eyes widened. The woman who was presiding over the STEM fair, Lucinda McCabe, was standing at the edge of the stacks, flipping through the books. “Whoa,” she said.

“Yes,” Jenkins replied.

“Hi there,” Eve said in a louder voice.

“Oh hi,” the woman called back. “This is amazing.”

“Is she meant to be here? Has the library recruited her or something?”

“Assuredly not,” Jenkins said, his voice tight.

“I’m assuming we have one of those memory-wiping doo-hickeys. You might want to get that.”

“Colonel Baird –” Jenkins started, a warning in his tone.

But Eve was thinking, _first get the woman out of the library, then deal with Jenkins and his OCD rules about who can be in his space_. She stepped away. “Miss McCabe, I’m sure you must be very confused right now,” she started.

“No, actually.”

Jenkins was shaking his head, trying to get her attention.

“You fell, you bumped your – no, actually?”

“No, actually,” McCabe repeated. “Everything just got much, much clearer.” She waved her hands and the tables parted before her as she strode up to them. _Oh fuck_ , she thought. _Magic monster thing._

Jenkins had his arms crossed in front of him like he was trying to hold himself together. “Colonel Baird,” he said, “I would like you to meet Morgan Le Fay.”

The woman giggled.

Eve stared at her. “Lucinda McCabe is Morgan Le Fay,” she muttered, sizing the woman up. “I know that name…”

“And you’re a librarian?” McCabe asked.

“I sort of know that name…”

“Oh, a guardian, sorry. I’ll talk slower.”

 _Bitch._ “Hey!”

McCabe laughed again.

“Sister of King Arthur,” Jenkins explained. “Responsible for the downfall of Camelot.”

“Oh, come now,” McCabe chided. “We both know that’s not true, Galeas.”

Jenkins drew a breath at the name. Eve glanced to him, taking in the anger in his stance, and then back to her, smug and superior, radiating danger. Oh, this was part of that dark something that hung over Jenkins like smog, for sure.

“The most powerful witch on the planet, raised an army, and killed Arthur,” he accused.

“Nah, I prefer sorceress,” she replied, walking around the table like she owned the place. “Witch has too much gender baggage. Oh, you found one! It’s lovely, isn’t it?” She held up the cell phone. “Word the wise,” she continued, addressing Eve. “I’d stay here for the next few minutes if I were you. It’s all about to begin. The feedback loop? All this magic flying around, the rule of three coming to punish all those naughty little boys and girls. Now if you’ll excuse me…”

Eve had been walking too. She had her gun in her hand.

“Colonel, shoot her,” Jenkins growled.

“Don’t tell me who to shoot, Jenkins,” she shot back.

“Thank you, guardian,” McCabe smiled.

“Oh, I will shoot you, but not because he says so. What happens to those kids when the backlash begins?” She needed intel.

But Jenkins was unravelling beside her. “She is one of the most evil creatures on earth –”

“Hold your tongue.” McCabe pointed at him and Jenkins started choking, folding over on himself with a horrible retching sound.

Eve pulled the trigger, three shots in rapid succession.

The bullets fell to the floor before McCabe’s outstretched hand. She rolled her eyes. “Please,” she said. “If shooting me was an option, how do you think I would have survived the 19th century? When Tennyson became popular, it was a nightmare.” She strolled out of the Annex.

Eve ran to Jenkins. But he was breathing again, and he waved her off. “No. She has left a trail of bloodshed a thousand years long. Go. Get her. Whatever the cost!”

Eve ran. She caught up with the librarians just about the same time that McCabe did. She gloated about her wish spell, made a comment about staying forever young, and disappeared. But Eve knew. She knew she wasn’t done. Leaving her librarians to do their work, she set off to do hers.

As she ran down the hall, she opened the app and made a quick wish. Then, without missing a beat, when she found the other woman, Eve punched her in the face. McCabe laughed as the magic charge surged around them, her teeth red with her own blood.

“I couldn’t stop it if I wanted to,” McCabe explained. “Looks like you have a choice, guardian. Either you kill me, or you save the kids. No time for both. I do believe you have a chance,” she continued, and for some reason, Eve trusted the truth of that statement. “It’s the first time I’ve hurt in centuries. But you still have to make a choice. Kill me or save them.”

For a moment Eve considered it. But there really wasn’t a choice. “This isn’t over,” she promised, pushing McCabe away. Then she ran. She got there just in time, grabbing the fifth enchanted table leg and hopping up on stage to complete the pentagram that Cassandra had set up. The leg in Jones’ hand captured the magical surge; then it flowed to her, to Amy, to Cassandra, and finally to Stone. Everyone stood, safe within the shield they had created, as the charge dispersed.

Then she was… alone. In silence. No, not alone. McCabe was there, gasping in pleasure.

“Where is everyone?” she demanded.

“Don’t worry,” McCabe laughed. “You did it! You saved them all. They’re out there somewhere, in the world.”

“And where are we?”

“Between the seconds. Between the tick and the tock.”

“So, let’s finish this then.”

McCabe shook her head. “Guardian, on your best day, you might be able to mess up my hair. And you already had your best day.” She zapped the phone in Eve’s hand, rendering it useless.

Okay, if she couldn’t intimidate… intel. She needed intel. “So now what?” Eve demanded. “You bring magic back to the world, rule it?”

“Bring magic back to the world? Oh my, no. Thanks to you, I finally have enough power to hide.” McCabe started walking away.

“You did all this so you could hide?”

“Maybe even open a door to the fey, the mirror lands? Anywhere but this doomed little world when it happens.”

“When what happens?”

“You’ll understand. You’ve already been woven into the loom of fate.” McCabe turned and spouted off a bunch of Latin. Ordinarily it was the kind of thing that Eve would barely pay attention to, but there was no Stone, Flynn, or Jenkins to translate. So, she listened closely, committing the unfamiliar words to memory. “Tell that to – what did he call himself? Jenkins? He’ll understand.”

Eve’s heart was pounding in her chest. She couldn’t move. McCabe snapped her fingers. Eve was back in the science fair, standing next to the guy with the volcano. McCabe was gone.

All she wanted to do was race back to the Annex, but they had a mess to clean up, so they stayed and dutifully declared a winner to the science fair. Then she gathered the troops and asked them to give her some time. “Just – go have fun for a while,” she said. “I gotta have a little talk with Jenkins.”

They looked at her doubtfully but obeyed. Her heart was still pounding when she walked through the Annex door. It hadn’t stopped.

He was waiting for her in the dim light, sprawled across the stairwell, drinking. “That was a mistake,” he told her in no uncertain terms as soon as she walked in.

That was not what she was expecting. “We saved a hundred lives,” she argued.

He didn’t even give an inch. “And doomed her next thousand victims,” he fired back. He was furious. She’d never seen him like this. He could barely articulate himself; he was so overcome. “You had her. For the first time in centuries, she was caught off guard.” He stalked down the stairs toward her.

She stood her ground. “I am a guardian. I am not a hired gun. I am not here just to kill,” she reminded him. His anger stalled at hearing his own words come back at him. Eve didn’t let up. “And if she’s so terrible,” she continued, “Why are the two of you so cozy?”

“We’ve both lived a long time,” he said, his voice softer. “Paths cross.”

“My experience? You don’t hate strangers quite that much.” She walked toward him, just catching the way his expression crumpled out of the corner of her eye. His hands were shaking. “She said the end of the world is coming.”

He didn’t seem surprised. “Well, Morgan has many vices, but she never, ever lies.”

“She also had a little love note for you,” she added, ignoring the hurt that flitted across Jenkins’ face at the sarcasm. She repeated the Latin, word for word.

He sighed. “Do not fear the villain,” he translated. His breath caught. “Fear the hero. The end – an end is coming, Colonel,” he said, walking away, his voice rising again. “And trust me, if you do not learn how to fight the war instead of just winning the battles, none of us will survive.” He stormed off, leaving her alone in the dimness of the annex.

Her heart kept pounding.


	7. The Heart of Darkness

Things were not good after that. Jenkins avoided her entirely if he could get away with it – avoided them all, really. She explained that he knew McCabe but decided against telling them who he’d said she was. She left another message for Flynn that he didn’t respond to. One by one, the trainees came to her to ask what was wrong with Jenkins. During the final conversation, with Jones, she glanced up to see the old man sliding back into the shadows of the stacks. She knew immediately that he hadn’t intended to eavesdrop, so she wasn’t angry. In fact, it seemed to help. He was still distant with her, but the anger lessened slightly, and he found a way to get back into his rhythm with the team. She could see that he was putting effort into being more kind to them, even if he couldn’t quite do the same for Eve. 

They carried on, following the clippings book on one mission after the next. They still met to discuss the trainees, but it was all business, and Eve mourned the loss of connection. She knew she should be angrier than she was – after all, Jenkins had exploded all over her and then shut her out – but she also knew that this was the old stuff, the dark stuff that made Jenkins want to run. And he wasn’t running, which was probably sucking up every ounce of energy he had. She’d been there too many times to stay mad.

During the quiet weeks, they worked on the lay lines that Cassandra had been mapping, finding the broken ones, and fixing them. Eventually they ended up in Slovakia dealing with a haunted house that just happened to fall along a broken lay line.

“I hate that coincidence,” Jenkins said when she reported in. He had her walk through the facts as they were currently known, concluding with, “not good.”

Even though it wasn’t the same as it had been, talking to Jenkins helped her focus on the mission at hand. And the first thing she needed to do was bench Cassandra. The woman had just finished wiping away the blood of yet another nosebleed; she was pushing herself too hard, trying to do too much, and Eve didn’t think she could be reliable under those circumstances. Fortunately, she didn’t put up too much of a fight.

As soon as Stone commented that the house they approached didn’t belong in Slovakia, Eve started to get the willies. She’d always hated horror movies. There were too many horrible things that happened in real life; she didn’t need some gory ‘everybody dies’ story as entertainment. They cleared the rooms slowly and carefully, Jones setting the scroll anchors, and everything was good until they got to the kitchen. Then the house went, you know, weird.

She wasn’t going to come out and say it, but the truth was, she kind of chickened out. She let Jones and Stone run back into the house to set the last anchor, staying outside with Cassandra and the girl, Katie, that they’d rescued from the house. “What kind of librarian carries a gun?” Katie asked, and Cassandra didn’t even look back, leaving Eve to stumble through some bullshit explanation. “You’re very weird librarians,” Katie concluded.

“It’s a very weird library,” she acknowledged.

+++

Trying to investigate the upstairs didn’t go well. She tried to keep to her training, clearing rooms one by one, ignoring Jones’ commentary. The room she checked was empty, except for some stray clothes and a creepy picture on the wall. She looked up and saw an image of two men and a woman, sprawled across the floor, screaming at a shadow.

 _Threat!_ Her brain screamed. She had her piece in her hand without even thinking about it, and flung herself around the corner, ready to shoot.

Stone jumped back and clutched his heart, swearing. There was nothing else there. _Great,_ she thought. _It was going to be one of_ those _cases._

“Jenkins, quick question,” she said after sending Cassandra off to look after their charge. “Could anchoring lay lines in a haunted house jumpstart the ghosts?”

“You know, Colonel,” his voice came back, “You have an incredible talent for turning a bad situation into a worst-case scenario.” The bite in his words was just a little too sharp.

“Could you table the snark for two seconds?” she sniped back. “We have a situation.”

He boiled it down for her, talking her through a series of urban legends.

“Those are just stories,” she denied. “Urban legends.”

“Yeah,” he answered in his typical dispassionate way. “Different stories. Same house. And you’re standing in it.”

+++

The exposition took a long time, Jenkins wandering on and off tangents and requiring much more handholding than usual to get to the point. His need to speak to every possibility was a manifestation of his anxiety, she reminded herself, trying not to grind her teeth in impatience. But she was far too on-edge to keep an even keel. Stone and Jones picked up on her frustration, getting impatient themselves. Finally, Jenkins got to the point, and she jammed her phone back in her pocket, filling the guys in as quickly as she could.

She set Stone and Jones off in search of the ‘dark heart of the house’. As they left, Cassandra walked back in. She’d gotten Katie to open up about the smoke monster man thing that attacked her. And then Stone came back down saying Jones had disappeared. Katie started freaking out and there was just too much noise. “Everybody shut up,” she demanded. “It’s a combat scenario, right? Let me think.” To their credit, everybody did shut up, and just as she was starting to sort it out, a freaking phonograph appeared, playing the world’s most annoying song. Oh, she was _done_. “I am so sick of this house,” she said, walking up to the phonograph. As she reached out to smash it, though, she got thrown across the room.

Behind her, the wall burst into flame, spelling out the word “Katie” in charred wallpaper.

“Me?” the girl whimpered. “It got the others and now it wants me?”

“Not on my watch,” Eve swore. “Cassandra,” she ordered, “You and Katie get out of this house. Take the car, go back to Jenkins at the Annex.”

“No,” Cassandra protested. “I’m not leaving. I want to help find Ezekiel. We’re a team.”

Eve had no bandwidth for rebellion. “We are not a team,” she countermanded. “You are the librarians. I am the guardian. And right now, I’m telling you to get yourself and Katie out of this damn house.”

“Well you’re not sending Stone away.”

 _God damn it_ , Eve thought. _Why are you picking this time to fight me?_

“I need him. He can fight.” She sighed. “Cassandra,” she said as Stone came over to stand next to her, a silent show of support. “We all have different skills, and in this situation, your skills don’t apply. If we don’t find Jones, at least one of us needs to back to Jenkins safely.” The look Cassandra gave her was one of pure betrayal, but she went.

… until she came running back, screaming, Katie in tow, that was. Eve ran back down the stairs at the sound of their voices. She started out angry, but then something threatened to burst through the door and all was forgiven – _yup, running back to the house was the right call_ , she thought as she threw her weight against the door, trying to keep whatever it was from getting in. “Stone!” she screamed, “Stone, get down here!”

Stone didn’t come.

+++

And then she was fighting. Whatever it was, it packed a hell of a punch and it didn’t fall when she shot it. It threw her across the room again, and she felt ribs crack. Then something hit her, hard, across the back of the head, and she was out.

+++

She came to on the couch downstairs, her head throbbing. Jones and Stone were yelling at each other and she was just trying to stay conscious.

“Colonel Baird,” Jones said, “Please. Let me have this. It grants wishes.”

“You know what I wish?” she shouted back. “I wish I had something for this eye!”

And then the shadow thing appeared, and with it, Cassandra, who had apparently saved the day. Shadow man turned into a butler, and thank Christ, he had a cold pack. She let Stone haul her back to the car and collapsed against his shoulder.

+++

She drifted in and out as they made their way back to Oregon. When they finally arrived at the Annex, Jenkins was standing outside waiting. He helped Stone carefully lift her up and walk her inside. His arm wrapped gently around her waist and she found herself leaning gratefully into the solidity of his frame as they made their way down the hall.

He’d converted their main table into a makeshift triage; shooing the others away, he helped her sit on the table and stripped off her sweater so that he could examine her broken ribs. He tsk’d and made her drink something god awful that, to his credit, numbed the pain. He bound her ribs with impossible gentleness. As he treated her wounds, she watched him; his worry was plain in his eyes and in the hunch of his shoulders. She couldn’t help but feel moved.

“I fucked up,” she told him, her words slurred, feeling a spontaneous need to share.

“Miss Cillian forgives very easily,” he replied, already up to speed on the details like a Sergeant Major should be. He pulled her shirt back over her stomach and eased her down on the table, then moved methodically down her body, checking for other injuries.

“I keep fucking up,” she continued. “I keep trying to rein them in and they keep proving me wrong.”

He sighed. “You are their guardian,” he said. “But you’re also a Colonel. It’s in your nature to give orders. And,” he continued in a much quieter voice, “You are not the only one who makes mistakes.”

She pushed herself painfully up onto her elbows so that she could see his face. “Is that an apology?” she asked. He raised his eyebrows, a silent rebuke. Sighing, she lowered herself back down. “Don’t think for a minute that it escaped my notice that you didn’t answer, Jenkins,” she continued. He patted her arm but made no reply. “We should talk,” she finished.

“We will. But not now. Now, you rest.” He laid a cool cloth over her eyes and drew a blanket over her body, and she was asleep in seconds.

When she woke, she was laid out in a soft bed in a dark room. She could sense more than see Jenkins sitting nearby. “Where am I?” she asked, her voice barely more than a whisper.

“In bed, resting,” he replied. He helped her drink some water and she drifted off again.

When she woke up next, there was sun streaming in a window, and she was alone. She sat up and looked around. The room was sparse – a wardrobe against the wall opposite of the bed, and a straight-backed chair. There was a closed door just to the left of the chair, and an open door on the opposite side. She felt better – not exactly pain-free, but much further along in the healing process than she should have been overnight. Whatever Jenkins had cooked up, it was good.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed and tried not to think about the fact that she was clothed only in a t-shirt and her underwear. Glancing around, she saw clothes folded neatly on the chair, a pair of running shoes underneath. There was a handwritten note perched on the top of the clothes. Cautiously, she stood, and when her body didn’t immediately demand that she sit back down, she padded over to the chair and picked up the note.

“Miss Cillian assisted,” the note read. “I trust you will impress upon her the importance of not entering my chambers uninvited now that she is aware of their location. Now please get out.”

Eve grinned. From Jenkins, it was practically a hug.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I found this chapter tricky. For one thing, this was my least favourite episode, and for another, there isn't a lot of interaction between Eve and Jenkins to draw on. But I felt there would be consequences from the Rule of Three that would drag on, so I tried to build in Eve grappling with the conflict between her and Jenkins without deviating too much from the action of the episode. Hope it worked!


	8. The City of Light

When the clippings book sent them indications of a UFO nut disappearing from a small town a few weeks later, she thought Jones might die from happiness. “I’m telling you,” he said, “It’s aliens.”

“There are no such things as UFOs,” Jenkins admonished, sounding particularly grumpy. Jones shot him a dirty look that told Eve they’d already had this conversation more than once.

“Minotaurs, haunted houses, Santa Claus, yes – but UFOs, don’t be silly!” she said, enjoying the fact that the tension between her and Jenkins had diminished to the point where she could wind him up a little.

Predictably, Jake landed firmly on Jenkins’ side, while Cassandra spouted a bunch of statistics that put her on the side of Jones. “It is highly unlikely that we are the only intelligent life in this universe,” she concluded.

“I tell you what,” Eve jumped in, smirking, as she cut off Jenkins before he could reply. “We’ll just fill in the crack you’re about to make about us and intelligent life, and just skip right to the job.”

“Are you sure?” he asked, his face serious but his eyes dancing. “It was quite cutting.”

She stepped up and touched his arm. _Oh, it was good to have this banter back_. “I promise to be properly offended,” she replied. “I mean, I probably wouldn’t have even understood it at first, but I’ll be offended later.”

She stepped back and noticed that as she did, Cassandra also fell in so that they were all in a line, like little soldiers. Jenkins just about pouted. “Where’s the fun in that?” he replied, giving the globe a spin.

The mission was off to a roaring start – Jones would not shut up about aliens, Stone immediately started complaining about how the architecture didn’t fit, all the usual annoyances. They split up to get some intel. She and Jones wandered through the woods, looking for clues about the missing man, Victor Finch. There was a noise behind them, and they split up to try and investigate it.

Jones came upon it first. “Who’d put a gas lamp in the middle of the woods?” she heard him ask as she approached from the other direction. Then he said, “Victor Finch!”

She heard a groaning noise and ran, getting there in time to see the missing man, eyes glowing, making a move on Jones. She grabbed him from behind and slammed him into the lamppost. It glowed a bright yellow. Finch fell to the ground.

Her hands and feet were tingling, and then soon her whole body was. She looked up at Jones, totally confused, and then…

She couldn’t explain it. One minute she was there, flesh and blood, standing next to the lamppost. The next, she wasn’t – well, she was still there, but not… she couldn’t touch anything. It was like she was looking at the forest through a thick pane of glass. Jones was looking around wildly, confused. “Jones,” she said. “Ezekiel!” he didn’t respond. It was like he didn’t even hear her. “Ezekiel!” she tried again, walking up to him. She reached out, but she couldn’t touch him.

He looked right through her. Then he scrambled for his phone. “Jenkins!” he said, his voice pitching higher than normal, a sure sign that he was worried. “Colonel Baird just disappeared. No, I mean, like gone. I mean gone! Vanished! Disappeared!”

“Calm down, Jones,” she said. It didn’t help, but something Jenkins said must have. She wished he’d put the phone on speaker so she could hear. Hmm… she stepped close to Ezekiel, putting her ear next to the phone.

“Tell me exactly what happened, one thing at a time,” Jenkins was saying, his voice composed.

“Okay. Well. We – Baird and I – we were walking through the clearing where Victor Finch’s truck had been found when we heard a noise. We split up to investigate it. I came across a gas lamp in the woods, which I thought was pretty weird, and then Victor Finch came out of the woods with his eyes all glowy and tried to attack me.”

“His eyes were…. Glowy,” Jenkins repeated.

“Like he was possessed,” Jones replied. “You know, by aliens.”

Eve rubbed a hand across her forehead, willing away a headache. _Don’t argue, don’t argue, don’t argue_ , she chanted. Jones was two seconds away from full-blown panic. Fortunately, it was like Jenkins was a mind-reader. “Okay, so he tried to attack you. Then what happened?”

“Baird came running, grabbed him, threw him up against the lamppost. It… sort of sparked and went all yellow. Finch fell down unconscious, and then Colonel Baird started glowing yellow and disappeared. She’s gone.”

“And Finch is still there?”

“Yeah, he’s out cold.”

“Okay, I’m sending the others to you. Bring Finch back to town and put him in the hospital, and then come back here.”

Thankfully, Finch stayed out the whole time they waited. Eve tried everything she could think of to get Jones’ attention. She tried touching him, she tried moving other objects. She went back to the lamppost and tried to touch it. She tried yelling, whispering, even singing. She traced Finch’s pathway back into the woods until she lost it, thinking maybe there was another gas lamp that he’d emerged from, but there wasn’t. She tried touching Finch’s prone form in case she could communicate with the unconscious instead of the conscious. None of it worked. Stone arrived and together he and Jones lifted the prone man, carrying him awkwardly back to the vehicle he and Cassandra had clearly borrowed.

She followed them to the truck, but when she tried to get in it, she couldn’t. They drove away and left her there.

+++

Eve did a quick perimeter sweep to ensure that she was truly alone, and then started weighing her options: walk to town, or stay put? There wasn’t much to consider, really. As soon as she’d articulated the possibilities, she knew that Jenkins would be coming back to the woods to investigate the gas lamp. Staying put was the right answer. She glanced at her watch and was pleased to see it was still working, so that she at least had a sense of time. That got her excited for a minute – if her watch still worked, maybe her phone did too! But though she could pull it out of her pocket and dial, it didn’t do anything. It didn’t ring, it didn’t show a busy signal – it just wouldn’t call out. She tried texting. She tried tweeting. She tried email. None of those things worked. But she could write notes – so anything that the phone could do locally, on its own, was functioning. Anything that required a signal was not.

That was the first note she wrote.

By the time she heard their voices and their footsteps tramping down the trail, her phone was full of notes and questions – mostly speculations on what had happened to her (phase shift? Mirror land? Between the seconds like before with Morgan le Fay? Was she dead?), but also questions about what the gas lamp had to do with things – was it an artifact? Were the ones in town also artifacts? Was it maybe not the gas lamp but the location in the woods? And thoughts about how to get out – some kind of power transfer? Bonk on the head?

Jenkins lumbered in sight with Cassandra and Jones in tow, and she decided that testing the ‘bonk on the head’ theory could wait until after he’d done his investigations. As before, with Jones, when she tried to talk to them none of them could hear her, though she could hear them. Jenkins had some gadget in hand and had zeroed in on the lamppost when Stone walked up, with one of the townspeople in tow.

“Are you kidding me?” she said in exasperation. “Stone, what were you thinking?”

Cassandra seemed to read her mind. “You brought someone who is not a librarian to here? Yay.”

Jenkins ignored them both, confirming with Jones the facts of Eve’s… “poof”, as he put it. Eve’s headache flared up as Stone tried to explain away Jones’ explanation to his new friend, and Cassandra grilled her about the lamppost.

Jenkins concluded his test as the woman replied that she’d never seen this particular lamp before – in not a very convincing tone, Eve thought.

“So far it seems pretty –” he started, cautiously curling one hand around the post.

There was a buzz of electricity and Eve felt him like a surge of adrenaline. She couldn’t explain it. She just knew it was him that she was feeling, like he was standing beside her with his hand on her back. She appeared. _Oh, oh my god_ , she thought, reaching out for Jenkins. _Yes!_

But it didn’t last. Jenkins had pulled his hand away, reacting to the shock. The townie demanded to know what was going on and it took a moment for them to attempt – and fail – to explain what had just happened. When Jenkins came back to the lamp, cautiously touching it again, there was no surge. Nothing.

“Damn it!” she said, watching him. _That better not have been my only chance_ , she thought fiercely as she watched Stone do damage control with the townie. The woman flounced off while Jenkins and the librarians regrouped.

Eve was trying to stay focused on the conversation when she noticed movement out of the corner of her eye. There was another woman from town in the woods, watching them. Eve did not like the look on the woman’s face. She glanced back at her team, and then back at the woman, who had fallen into step, following the first townsperson. For a moment she hesitated.

 _When in doubt, get intel_ , she thought, and made up her mind. Casting one last look at Jenkins’ worried face, she hurried to catch up to the women. They knew something, she was sure of it, and even if she couldn’t explain what was happening to the others, she at least could gather information.

+++

Oh, and there was an abundance of information when she got to town. She was not alone anymore. As she came out of the bushes onto the main road, she suddenly realized that there were a dozen other faces. She instinctively ducked behind a tree. She didn’t know who they were – victims of magic like her? Or the perpetrators of her disappearance? She crept through the town, listening and watching.

After about half an hour, she reluctantly crept back to the edge of the woods. Jenkins, she knew, would send at least one of the librarians back to the forest. She needed to find a way to communicate.

+++

Sure enough, Cassandra and Jones were standing on the path when she got there. They were bickering. Jones was wearing a ridiculous-looking pair of goggles. She waved her hands at them and as he turned toward her, he jumped back.

He could see her! The dumb goggles let him see her!

“What, what, so we’re just like, screaming, whenever the mood takes us?” Cassandra said.

“Uh,” Jones stuttered back. “Yeah. Baird. She’s here.”

“Here. Where?” Cassandra glanced around. “I mean, is she okay?”

Eve threw up her hands at Jones, who was laughing. “She’s annoyed with me,” he replied, “So yeah. She’s fine.” Eve pointed back down the pathway behind them, exaggerating her movements. “Um, she wants us to go that way,” he translated, pointing in the same direction.

“Colonel Baird,” Cassandra said in an unnecessarily loud voice. “The source of the circuit is that way.” The redhead pointed the wrong way. “So, I think that’s where we can find out what’s causing this.”

Eve sighed. But yeah, Cassandra was right – the source would probably be important. She took a deep breath, then pointed at Cassandra, indicating behind her.

“I think she wants you to go on ahead and for me to follow her this way,” Jones explained.

“Good plan,” Cassandra agreed. “I can take care of myself.”

“Are you implying I can’t?” he asked.

“No, Baird is.” Cassandra pranced off.

Ugh, Eve thought, they were really going to need to have a chat about Cassandra’s ego during the debrief. But now she had more important things to do. She passed Jones on the trail and waited until he’d put his lenses back on, and then gestured for him to follow.

“Yeah, yeah,” he grumped. “Right behind you.”

+++

She got him to town and showed him the possessed people at the café. To his credit, Jones got it, way more quickly than she had. Unfortunately, his focus on the three people at the café kept him from watching his perimeter, and he was caught by one of the glowing people. From the way that she pointed and moaned at him, Eve concluded that her first instinct, to hide, was correct – they were likely hostile. When they started chasing Jones, she upgraded ‘likely’ to ‘definitely’.

Jones was smart, though. Recalling the power surge that had happened when Jenkins hit the lamppost in the woods, he smashed a fencepost against the nearest gas lamp he could find. Eve watched as three glowing people were forced out of the bodies they were in. It wasn’t the same strength of surge that she’d experienced with Jenkins, but it was enough to let the young man get away.

 _Thank god_ , she thought, her heart rate slowing as he made his way back toward city hall. She wanted to follow, but the three displaced glowing people were standing in the street, and she didn’t know what they might – or could – do to her if they found her. Reluctantly, she ducked behind some bushes and hid.

+++

Eventually, she saw her team, Jenkins included, walking out of town in the direction of the power source that Cassandra had identified. The townswoman that Stone had befriended was among them, as was one of the glowing people in possession of a body. She let them get quite a bit ahead, and then slunk into position, trailing them through the woods.

She caught up to them at the dam in time to hear the woman say, “we’ve been running tests…”

“Which have caused atmospheric disturbances – the lights,” Jenkins interrupted.

“Yes,” the woman acknowledged.

Eve rolled her eyes when she saw the look on Jenkins’ face. _Really?_ She thought, _at a time like this?_

Jenkins had carried on. “All the UFO sightings were from your apparatus.” He shook a finger, still in his jacket pocket, at Jones. “Told you!” he said smugly. “No such thing as UFOs.” The look of annoyance on Jones’ face perfectly reflected the annoyance she felt.

The townswoman asked them to help. Jenkins wisely called a private huddle. Eve followed.

“I say no,” Jones said as soon as they were alone. “They’re taking over bodies instead of asking for help. You just don’t do that.”

“They’re asking for help now,” Cassandra said, sympathy practically radiating off her body.

“Yeah, only ‘cause they got caught,” Jones replied. Eve had to agree.

“They’re people,” Stone said, looking at Jenkins. “And they’re trapped. Could you imagine being stuck for a hundred years? Watching the world go by, wanting to do things, wanting to go places?”

 _Point for Stone_ , Eve thought, watching Jones falter.

Cassandra answered Stone. “Look, all of this is assuming we can help. Based on Tesla’s plans, I give it a 50-50 shot at working.”

“And if it doesn’t work, then what?”

“If it doesn’t work, the excess energy gets dispersed through the gas lamp circuit. It’ll destroy the lamps, which is the only thing keeping them stable.”

Stone was upset. “So, if the lamps go, they go,” he summarized. Cassandra nodded.

Jones was gearing back up again, however. “Yeah, that’s if they’re telling the truth,” he commented. _Point for Jones_ , Eve thought.

But Jenkins was shaking his head. “This isn’t a choice,” he said, cutting off the conversation. “Right, wrong, true, false – none of that matters,” he continued. “Like it or not, it’s the only way to rescue Colonel Baird.”

Eve shook her head, a smile forming. She hadn’t even been thinking about herself – But Jenkins had. She watched him grin as all three trainees fell in line.

+++

She decided to stick with Jones and Jenkins once they leapt into action. About twenty minutes into the really boring preparations, she heard Morse code. Jones heard it too. But Jenkins just looked at him like he was nuts.

“It’s ‘L’,” she said. “It’s L for librarians!”

Thankfully, Jones didn’t subside just because Jenkins wasn’t responsive. He called Stone on the radio and repeated the sound he was hearing.

“It’s L for librarians,” Stone said.

“Duh,” said Eve. Her team ran back to the control room; she followed. The door was locked from the outside and Cassandra was stuck in the room. She silently cheered as Jones broke down the door.

“You heard me!” Cassandra exclaimed.

“Well, I did,” Jones replied. “What was that?”

“Mosquito tone,” she explained. “It’s a high-pitched sound that only young people can hear.”

Jenkins gave her the dirtiest look Eve had ever seen on his face. But she thought Cassandra was brilliant. She grinned.

Moments later, though, the grin fell off her face as Cassandra explained that they’d gotten things wrong – if their little experiment didn’t work, it wasn’t just going to blow the gas lamps; it was going to blow up the whole town. “If we stop it now, if we pull the plug, the energy will discharge safely, guaranteed,” she said.

Eve felt tears blur in her eyes as Jenkins replied, “Everyone will be trapped, including Colonel Baird.”

“Not your call,” she whispered, even though he couldn’t hear her. But he seemed to know that, because he didn’t push, even though she could clearly read what he wanted in his eyes. She was touched, that he felt such concern for her. Right until that moment, she hadn’t been entirely sure their relationship could be repaired.

With Jenkins falling silent, it was Jones that spoke up, saying, “I think she’d be the first one to make that call,” he said.

 _Point for Jones_ , she thought, her heart breaking.

+++

They separated, and she had to make a choice: Jenkins and Cassandra? Or Stone and Jones? In the end, she was a soldier, not a scientist. She left the two brainiacs in the control center and followed her boys outside. Stone left Jones at the gate, using the woman as a ground wire to get through the electric charge that was building. For a moment, she considered following.

Then she saw Finch turn the corner. Eve took a deep breath. Jones was the least prepared for a fight. If she could back him up, she had to. He swung wildly, failing, and the other man’s punch landed, knocking Jones to the ground. The electric charge grew stronger.

Suddenly, Eve became aware of the sensation of concrete beneath her feet. She was… not quite corporal, but more than she had been. Something was changing. Without hesitation, she reached down to Jones, thinking she could pull him to his feet.

Instead, she ended up… in him. Oh. Why hadn’t she thought of this before? She was a glowing person. Of course, she could possess someone.

She jumped to her – his – feet, taking stock. “Okay,” she said, hearing her words come out in Jones’ accent. “Short legs. Good to know.” She reached for Finch.

It was a bloody good brawl. After spending the entire day unable to touch anything, say anything, affect things in any way… she really enjoyed landing that first punch.

The electricity continued to crackle around them, and she felt a lurching sensation.

“Baird!” Jones said. “You’re back!”

She stood, looking at her body, thankfully corporal and not glowing in the least, feeling shocked.

“It’s working, it’s working!” Jones shouted. But no one could hear him.

The power went out.

“Up there,” Jones said, pointing to the roof where Stone was. They found him cradling the woman, almost in tears.

+++

It took her a while to get up to speed. Jones was angry. Stone was grieving. Cassandra was… despondent was a good word. Actually, that was a good word for all of them. “It wasn’t your fault,” she told Jones and Cassandra. “Sometimes you just lose. You did good, all of you, but sometimes you just lose.”

“This bites,” said Jones, storming off. Cassandra went after him, touching her arm as she went.

 _What a fucking day_ , she thought, closing the clippings book, her heart heavy.

So of course, that was when Jenkins wandered in, as though nothing had happened at all. “Colonel,” he said, placing a thin notebook in front of her, “Thought you might want this.” He handed her a pen.

“What is this?” she said, taking the pen on reflex.

“The appointment book,” he answered. She just looked at him, not in the mood for cryptic. He got the message. “The library, by its nature, works on timescales beyond the normal human lifespan. If the librarian, for example, built a new capacitor in a dam with a few stabilizing design features and let it charge for a century or so…”

“They’d want to make a note of it,” she said, a smile spreading across her face. “So future librarians know there’s an appointment to keep.”

“Chop, chop,” he said, smiling.

+++

Out of respect for Stone, they saved the debrief for a couple of days, when everyone’s emotions were a little more centered. Cassandra and Jenkins had thrown themselves into building a new capacitor, and while it still sucked that the townsfolk would have to wait another century for their freedom, the mission felt like much less of a failure by the time they’d regrouped. 

Eve went for a long walk after the session. When she came back, the trainees were nowhere to be seen, and there was a beer waiting for her at the Annex table. Jenkins sat across from it, fiddling with his teacup. She took her seat, took a swig, and waited. He cleared his throat. “Colonel Baird,” he said, not quite meeting her eye. “I apologize for what I said after Morgan… it is never a mistake to save innocent lives. I should have said something earlier.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“I – when you were gone,” he glanced at her and quickly away, “I realized how unfortunate it would have been if we had parted ways with things left unsaid.” He took a breath. “How much I would have regretted leaving things unsaid,” he finished in a quiet voice.

 _Ah_ , she thought, _confession time_. She waited. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it abruptly, shifting in his chair. She let him try two more times before she took pity on him and sat forward. “Okay. How about I tell you what I’ve figured out and you decide how much more you want to say?”

He shot a grateful look her way and nodded. “Okay. Dulaque fell out of a plane and didn’t die. When you commented on it, you said, ‘ _we’re_ tougher than that’. You know Morgan Le Fay who is apparently King Arthur’s sister. I’m going to go ahead and guess that you and Dulaque have been around about as long as she has, and are… indestructible?”

“Something like that,” he replied.

“And I can tell that you’re a soldier.” His brow wrinkled. “Were,” she amended. “Retired?”

“Retired is a good word for it,” he acknowledged.

“And the big evil thing that is coming?”

Jenkins shook his head. “I don’t know any more than you do.”

“Morgan said she wanted the magic from the STEM fair to get away from whatever is coming,” she said. Jenkins’ eyebrows rose.

“And she had the nerve to call _me_ a coward,” he muttered. “But if that’s the case, then, whatever it is, it’s…”

“Ancient history?” Eve said it with a sardonic smile, and knew she’d hit the right tone when he rolled his eyes.

“Ancient’s a wheensy bit harsh,” he replied, making a face.

It was good. He was sticking with her, even though he was clearly uncomfortable having this conversation. She could push a little more. “Does the thing that’s coming have anything to do with your relationship with Dulaque and Morgan?” she asked.

“I don’t know, Colonel. Dulaque is certainly involved. He’s invested in it. I don’t know why. I would tell you if I did.”

She sighed, drawing on her beer and then rolling the bottle between her hands, watching it spin. “Who is he to you?” she asked.

Jenkins’ teacup rattled against the saucer as he put it down. She glanced up and saw that he looked absolutely stricken. He drew a shallow, hurried breath. That was way more reaction than she’d intended to incite.

“Don’t answer,” she said quickly. “Jenkins. It’s okay. You don’t have to answer.”

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I can’t…”

“You’re allowed to say no, remember?” She took a deep, steady breath, and was encouraged to see that he mimicked her. Two more breaths, and his hand steadied. She was no stranger to trauma. Whoever Dulaque was, he’d had a personal connection to Jenkins and used it to hurt him badly. She ran through the possibilities: Former commander? Friend? Lover? It was something like that. That was enough. “Is your past relationship with Dulaque going to be a problem?” she asked, choosing her words carefully.

“It’s a complication. It would not prevent me from doing what needed to be done.” She heard the promise in those words.

“That’s all I need to know, soldier,” she said, and watched Jenkins’ body relax.

“I should have approached you sooner,” he said. “I should not have left this to fester between us.”

Eve watched him for a moment, considering how to respond. “I don’t know what your relationship with the library is – other than that you’re, as you say, ‘paid in full,’” she finally said. “But I’d wager that you’ve been ‘retired’ and living here, alone, for a long time. And now here we are, in what was your space, making all kinds of demands on your time. You’ve had to adapt quickly – it hasn’t even been a year – and frankly, you’ve responded to us better than we’ve responded to you.” Jenkins started to sputter like he did when it sounded like someone was going to pay him a compliment. That inability to hear anything positive was worrying, but she knew he was already well beyond his comfort zone, so she decided to save that issue for another day and hurried on. “One significant conflict in all these months is a lot better than I expected.”

Jenkins cocked his head. “Better than I expected, as well,” he conceded.

“You’re a valuable asset and – I’d like to call you my friend,” Eve suggested.

Jenkins smiled his real smile then. He held up his cup to her. “To friendship,” he said.

She leaned over to clink her bottle against the porcelain, grinning in return.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was a lot of fun because for most of the episode, we don't actually know what Eve was doing, so I got to make a bunch of stuff up. Plus, I figured that enough time had gone by now that Eve and Jenkins could reconcile, which was a scene that I wanted to write from the moment I saw The Rule of Three, so yay!
> 
> Also I snuck in a (slightly paraphrased) line from Night Court. I couldn't help myself. Bonus points if you can identify it!


	9. The Loom of Fate

Around midsummer, Flynn got in touch. Of course, he didn’t call, or text like he’d promised – in fact, he didn’t get contact her at all. He wrote a letter to Jenkins.

“New mission,” Jenkins announced, waving the letter when she arrived at work. The librarians-in-training were already there; Eve had taken the morning to do a supply run, to stock up their first aid kits. Not every injury needed a magical solution, after all.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Mr. Carsen requests the pleasure of your company,” Jenkins answered, “He asks you to meet him at the Monolith of Mut.”

“Egyptian mother goddess,” Stone said right away. “I’ve never heard of a monolith dedicated to her, though.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Jenkins answered. “It hasn’t been discovered yet… well, by, you know…” he gestured vaguely toward the front door, meaning the outside world

Eve held up a hand to cut Stone off before he travelled far down obscure-facts lane. “When does Flynn need us to meet him?”

“At your earliest convenience,” Jenkins replied. “I’ve taken the liberty of setting the door.” He swept his hands invitingly toward the broom closet.

“An undiscovered Egyptian monolith,” Jones said with a gleam in his eye.

“Steal nothing!” she ordered and opened the doors.

+++

Flynn wasn’t there, of course, but mummies were. Jones stuck his hand where it didn’t belong and the next thing they knew, the temple was shaking around them. She and Stone took up mummy detail while Cassandra decoded the walls, and just when it was about to go all to shit, moments before she was going to fall back on screaming for help from Jenkins, Flynn appeared, all smug, to save the day.

“Next time, mummy memo,” she told him, smiling. “Hello librarian.”

“Hello, guardian,” he said, eyes only for her.

“You came back alive.”

“So, I did.”

They had a lovely moment where she contemplated kissing him, which Jones of course interrupted.

+++

Flynn had a way to bring back the library. Jenkins was duly called, and the sarcophagus was hauled back to the Annex. The old soldier immediately got to work. Eve helped herself to a cup of coffee, Flynn following her like a dog, providing unnecessary explanation for his latest theory. In the middle, he said, “I missed you,” and she felt lighter than she had for months.

The others joined them, books and scrolls in hand, as Flynn and Jenkins bounced ideas off each other. Eve watched as the librarians-in-training – well, Stone and Cassandra, at least – tried to join in. Cassandra seemed to grasp whatever mumbo jumbo Jenkins was talking about, but then she surprised Eve by freaking out, kind of like she had in the beginning. “Infinite,” she said, “Infinity, infinite…”

“Cassandra!” Eve shouted, trying to break her out of it.

“No, no, no, no,” Jake muttered gently, reaching for her as the young woman collapsed.

“I saw it all,” she exclaimed. “I saw it all, all the way down.” She grimaced in pain. “I can’t, I can’t do this math.” Her nose started to bleed.

Eve’s heart rate accelerated. Stone’s interventions were usually effective at bringing Cassandra out of her fugue, but she was still mired in it, babbling on.

Eve glanced at Jenkins. His eyes were wide and worried, but she could also see the gears turning. He took up the babble as Cassandra trailed off. “This leads to the void!” he exclaimed. Eve was desperately trying to keep up, but he made no more sense than Cassandra had. “The space between dimensions.”

“The exact space where the library now floats, cut off from the real world,” Flynn finished, and it all started to make sense. “If we could open that door and I could find the library, I could anchor it back to here, back to this annex.”

+++

All they needed, it turned out, was stuff they just happened to have: the app, the thread, Tesla’s stabilizer, the story book. Funny how that worked out.

“Morgan le Fay, really?” Flynn asked Eve, surveying the equipment.

She nodded. “Oh,” she said, turning to Jenkins with a smile, “and we never did have _that_ conversation.”

Jenkins quickly deflected as the other three finished preparations for their inter-dimensional… thingy.

“Be my guest,” Flynn said, offering Eve the storybook. He bumped into her as she began to narrate, in what she assumed was intended to be a playful way. “Once upon a time, there was a very annoying –”

“Dashing!”

“Librarian who wanted to open a door to…” she trailed off. She had no idea how to summarize the complex dimensional crap Flynn and Jenkins had been spouting.

“His home,” Flynn supplied. Eve felt a pang of sadness. But then the machine started to work. Flynn laughed madly. “Jenkins, you’re a genius!” he exclaimed.

“One is aware, sir,” Jenkins replied.

Eve grinned. “The librarian and his friends used the door to open a path to a place they had lost,” she continued.

But of course, it couldn’t be that simple. Flynn congratulated Jenkins on his notes, and Jenkins replied that he hadn’t sent any notes, and then the stupid sarcophagus started smoking. And they all started choking.

“But then a hero arrived to set the world right,” another voice said. Eve had fallen to the ground and was struggling to breath, but she recognized the voice. Dulaque. She started crawling toward the table. By the time she’d found it and was able to haul herself to her feet, Lamia lay bleeding in Flynn’s arms. Dulaque looked her right in the eye. “And so, with blood, a passage was opened,” he said, “To the loom of fate.”

He ran through the door. Eve didn’t even hesitate. She threw herself after him.

+++

She found herself standing on the shore of a river. Her mind was still fuzzy from the smoke. Dulaque was muttering behind her, and in the next moment, Flynn was standing in the river, shouting at her. “Don’t let him cut the fabric!”

Eve made it across the bridge, only a few feet away from Dulaque. The world shook. She grabbed the edge of the bridge to steady herself…

And the bridge was gone. It was a stone. Trying to find her feet, she accidentally clotheslined a guy. She glanced around. They were in a forest. The guy she’d clotheslined was Flynn. A man came out of nowhere, gun raised.

“Who is this guy?” she asked as he marched them ahead of him.

Flynn just looked at her. “Who are you?” he asked.

Oh _fuckity-fuck-fuck,_ Eve thought. _We’re in trouble now._

She didn’t really have time to figure out what was wrong with Flynn or why he couldn’t seem to remember who he was, because the people who had taken them freaked out over her NATO ID and she knew she was going to have to fight her way out. Fortunately, she had help; moments after she made her move, a stranger joined the fray, taking out the remaining hostiles.

“Who are you?” Flynn demanded.

“I’m the librarian,” a gravelly voice that she knew said. The man before her pulled his turban away, revealing Stone’s face.

“Eve,” he said, voice heavy with relief. She was about to reply in kind when he took two steps toward her and grabbed her face, kissing her soundly.

“Huh?” her mind went blank. She stared at Stone, who looked perfectly comfortable slamming his lips into hers. “Nope,” she said. “No, no, no, no…”

+++

Things didn’t get any more sensible with a walk to clear her head, and it was obvious that they were in the middle of a war zone, so she didn’t have much choice but to walk back.

“You’re the librarian?” she clarified with Stone.

He nodded. “Yeah, going on ten years,” he replied. “How are you here?”

“I’m the guardian,” she said.

“Eve,” he said. “You’re dead. I watched you die.”

Okay, so this was definitely not her dimension. Slowly, things started coming together. _Fate_ , she thought. _This was about fate_.

“Hey!” Stone said, as he ran around setting up some teleportation thingy to save her hide. “In your world, we didn’t have our ten years?”

“We just met a few months ago,” Eve answered. “We’re friends though, despite ourselves sometimes.”

“Then the alternate me’s an ass,” he answered. “’Cause I miss you, Eve.”

“Stone, they’ll kill you,” she said.

“Let ‘em try,” he grinned. “I’m the librarian.”

And the forest vanished.

+++

She and Flynn came to consciousness standing in a poorly-lit room. Flynn freaked out. She scanned around, looking for danger.

Danger didn’t come, exactly. Instead, it was Jones.

“Who are you?” Flynn demanded.

“I’m the librarian,” he replied.

+++

Jones helped fill in some of the gaps in what was going on but didn’t have any better news than Stone had had in terms of Eve, personally. Dead, again, killed by Dulaque. Yeah, she was starting to see the pattern.

“Not to look a gift-guardian in the mouth,” Jones said then, “But maybe you could help us with our ghost problem.”

“Uh, ghosts aren’t really the librarian’s job,” she protested.

“They are now.” He led her to the window and lifted the curtain. Outside, thousands of people stood, eyes black. “Welcome to ghost world.”

He explained how the House of Refuge had opened a hole in the world. Flynn freaked out again. She followed him into a storage room, explaining about librarians and guardians, and asking him why he never answered his letter.

“I just, I know myself,” he replied. “I was comfortable in the university, so I, I didn’t go. It was, uh, it was a twist on a thread on the random loom of fate.”

_Loom of fate…_

She stared at him. She was there with him in the room. _She was lying on her back, bleeding, by the river._ She was both places. Son of a bitch.

“He cut it,” she realized. “He cut the fabric. And when he cut the fabric, he cut history.” She realized.

There was a crash outside.

+++

It was amazing how well Flynn did at stopping the ghosts, given that he didn’t even think magic was real. But they didn’t have much time to celebrate because they started to phase out.

“For what it’s worth, it was good seeing you again, Colonel Baird,” Jones had time to say. “And thanks for bringing him along too. You two arriving just in time – it’s like it was fate.”

They vanished.

+++

The world the appeared in was hot and rusted. And it stank of Sulphur.

“That’s a dragon,” Flynn said.

“No shit,” Eve said.

She didn’t have time for much else. There was a painful shock in her back, and then she was out again.

+++

She woke tied to a chair. “Who are you?” Eve looked up to see Lamia pointing a knife at her. “You are not Eve Baird. I saw her die.”

“Yeah, well, I just saw you die, so we’re even,” she muttered. She let Lamia go on a little bit, and then made her move. She was just starting to get the upper hand when she was pushed, by some unseen force, away from the other woman.

“My librarian,” Lamia said, her voice shaking, staring at the ground. “Apologies.”

Eve gaped. It was Cassandra.

“Aren’t you interesting,” she said, approaching Flynn. “You’re not from around here.”

Eve shook her head. Cassandra looked very… different. She stroked Flynn’s cheek with a confidence that Eve’s Cassandra had never had. Then she started babbling about now versus here and sounded very much like her old self. Flynn wisely just nodded.

“And Eve, but not my Eve.”

“Please don’t say I’m like your mother,” she replied.

+++

Cassandra led them through dingy halls full of refugees as she and Lamia filled them in on her world.

“Taking the library was one thing,” Lamia explained, justifying why she’d killed Dulaque. “But Cassandra – when Excalibur healed her, I knew that she was the chosen one.”

Eve was there, listening. _Eve was on the riverbank, bleeding._ She asked Cassandra why Dulaque would cut the loom to go back to Camelot. Flynn answered instead.

“What I don’t understand is why Camelot,” he finished. “Oh, wait. I do understand. Dulaque, King Arthur.” _King Arthur again_ , Eve thought dimly. She was going to strangle Jenkins for not being more forthcoming if she ever got out of this mess. Or if she ever found a timeline with Jenkins in it.

She was tempted to ask Cassandra about the old man, but the woman – witch? Librarian? – was busy expositing with Flynn about Dulaque forgetting to re-weave the loom. Bla, bla, fate’s unwinding, history will unravel…

“We lost, Eve,” Cassandra said.

To his credit, Flynn wasn’t willing to give up. He was invested now. And, as was typical, his suggestion was stupidly simply. Just, you know, reweave the loom.

“Magically possible,” Cassandra affirmed. “But we will need a very specific thread, something ancient, something charged with dimensional power, and tied as closely as possible to the original Greek myth. I don’t suppose you have one of those lying around.”

Eve grinned. “Here’s something funny,” she said. She was going to get to find out what happened to Jenkins after all.

+++

The Annex was long-abandoned, dark and covered in cobwebs. “Jenkins? Jenkins!” she screamed. She ran into the stacks, looking for her Sergeant Major. He wasn’t there. This wasn’t her timeline. Eve nearly lost all hope. Flynn came through again, babbling something that Cassandra immediately understood.

“We’ll need a focus,” Cassandra said. “Something common across all the timelines that you’ve travelled.”

 _Duh,_ thought Eve. She and Flynn said it at the same time. “The librarians.”

+++

And it fucking worked.

Eve grabbed the thread and a sword – armed was always better. They said their goodbyes to the three alternate librarians and headed back into the void.

“I’ll assume you have a degree in ancient weaving,” she said to Flynn.

“Well, it’s folded up into a doctorate on medieval…”

“Shut up and weave,” she replied.

“Who are you looking for?” he asked as he started.

“Dulaque may still be here,” she answered.

“Should I be worried?”

Eve shrugged. “Well, he’s a pretty frail old guy,” she answered, and had just remembered the part where falling out of a plane didn’t kill him when something knocked her down. She turned, struggling to catch her breath, to see a young man standing before them. He was, he explained, Dulaque, as he had been at the time of Camelot.

“It was a perfect world,” he continued when she asked why he was so obsessed with Camelot.

“Until you ruined it, Lancelot,” Flynn shouted from behind Eve. “Lancelot Dulaque.”

“Yes, well, I’m fixing that now,” Dulaque – Lancelot – replied. _Lancelot_ , she thought. _Must remember that. Must ask Jenkins…_ She didn’t have time to follow that thought any further. Lancelot stepped up, thrusting, and pain burst in her chest.

She fell, bleeding, to the ground, landing on the riverbank. Her eyes slid shut, fading in and out.

“There are other versions of you that might have had a chance,” Lancelot was saying to Flynn now. “But there’s only one swordsman my equal, and you are not him.”

There was a clash of metal on metal. “Lancelot,” a new voice said.

Eve smiled. _Jenkins_ , she thought. “Galahad,” she heard Lancelot say.

Everything faded into black for a while. She came to hearing Jenkins say, “This is her fate. I’m sorry.”

She felt Flynn trying to lift her up.

Eve laughed. “I do die in every timeline,” she said.

Flynn said no. Jenkins was on the other side, and she was upright. She leaned against Jenkins until suddenly she found she was leaning against Stone instead. She caught a fleeting glimpse of the library and felt herself set down on the steps. Cassandra was weeping. Things went black again.

Then she gasped, waking suddenly. Flynn was kneeling before her. His eyes were the only thing she could see. “I was supposed to die,” she said, her chest heaving.

“I don’t believe in fate,” Flynn answered. He lifted her to her feet. The library was back, laid out before them.

“How does it feel?” she asked him.

“Like home,” he replied.

They stood in awe for a moment, and then she heard a sound behind them, a polite clearing of the throat. “Jenkins,” she said, turning around, Flynn’s hands still on her arm.

He smiled down at her, more warmth in his brown eyes than she could recall ever seeing there before. “Colonel Baird,” he replied. “I’ve made tea.”

+++

They talked about it, the three of them late into the night. It was Flynn’s suggestion, but Jenkins heartily agreed. It was time for the three librarians-in-training to make their own way, full-fledged librarians.

“I don’t know,” Eve said. “You didn’t see those other worlds. I mean, they were amazing – but they were all so… damaged.”

“That’s because they were each on their own,” Flynn answered. “Here – they’ll still be together. We all will. We’re a team. All six of us,” he said, pointedly looking at Jenkins. Jenkins offered him a little bow. “They’re ready, Eve,” Flynn finished, turning back to her.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Why rein them in, right?”

“Indeed.” Jenkins sent a little smile her way.

+++

Flynn made the announcement the next morning and handed out the mini clippings books that Jenkins had.

“Trust me, you’ll be fine,” Eve said. “I’ve seen it.”

Jenkins interrupted to hand Flynn a letter from Charlene, and her librarian was off on another tangent, not even waiting to say goodbye. So, she said the goodbyes for them both, listening from around the corner as Stone and Jones reversed their plans to take a vacation, instead hurrying to join Cassandra for the case she’d pulled. They were going to be fine. Flynn seemed to be doing fine. That just left one member of her team.

She found him at his desk, sorting through papers like he always did. “Jenkins,” she said, approaching him. “Thank you.”

He gave her a knowing look, but said, “I’m sorry?”

“For what you did. How you saved us at the loom.”

He did that thing where his eyes sort of pleaded with her, when he was scared that she was going to start stirring up emotions. “Uh, well, while I was undoubtedly heroic, I’m afraid that like the others, I don’t remember what happened while history and fate were…” he made a little noise, “unspun.” He looked everywhere but directly at her.

“Yeah,” she said, not believing a word of it. “Flynn says he can’t remember anything either.” She raised her voice, aware that her librarian was above them in the mezzanine.

“Vexing, still vexing!” Flynn shouted back.

They were lying to her, she knew. And she was equally certain it was a coordinated effort. “So how did I remember?” She tried, thinking maybe she could catch Jenkins in some inconsistency. “How did my mind stay intact across all those threads?”

“If I may venture a guess,” Jenkins answered, “it’s because you did it once before. The Christmas affair – you fractured in Santa’s place and spread across space and time. So, you were prepared to hold up under similar circumstances.”

“That’s a hell of a coincidence,” she said sharply.

“Uh huh,” he agreed, not giving an inch. “I mean the storybook, the tesla device, the thread? All were required to bring the library home. Almost, well, almost as if these past months, your missions had been directed by fate itself.” Oh, he was being smug.

Eve smiled, feeling smug herself. She’d caught him. “But the clipping book didn’t send us to Santa,” she reminded him. “You did.”

She saw it in every motion. The way he put his glasses back on, the slight nod of acknowledgement, the look in his eyes, his smile. He was totally caught out, he knew he was caught out, and he still wasn’t going to give. “Coincidence,” he concluded, and walked away.

She was going to charge after him, but Flynn chose that moment to come down the stairs, whistling. The clipping book shuddered, and as usual, the serious conversation got cut off in favour of reviewing the latest case.

“So,” Flynn said, his eyes planted on the book. “I was also thinking that, um, I’ll throw this out there – and I don’t want to put any pressure on you one way or the other – nor do I want to assume you have or have not…”

“You’re asking me on a date,” she said, cutting to the chase.

“Yeah. Yes, I am. Good, ‘cause I had about nine more minutes of that,” He rushed over to the door.

“Where were you thinking of taking me?” she asked. He handed her coat to her. “Going to fight –”

“Investigate!”

“An evil cult…”

“Monsters!”

“Is your idea of a date.” He just gave her a look. He was irresistible. “Do you have any idea what’s on the other side of this door?”

“No,” he replied, coming to take her hand. “But isn’t that great?” They jumped through together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was another tricky one, because there was so much to the episode. I didn't want the chapter to get too long so hopefully I struck the right balance between providing enough information that it can sort of stand alone, and not repeating the entire episode word-for-word.


	10. Epilogue

Several days later, she came through the front door alone. She’d left Flynn basking in the afterglow of their latest adventure, promising to rejoin him soon. There was just something that drew her back to the library, a sense of unfinished business.

Jenkins was sitting at the Annex, tea in hand. There was an empty seat and a cold beer across from him. A smile broke out across her face. “Thanks,” she said, sitting down and opening her drink. He saluted her with his teacup.

“How are things with Mr. Carsen?” he asked.

“Definitely an adventure. How are things going with the library?”

Jenkins shrugged. “I never much worked in the library,” he admitted. “It… has required some adjustment on my part.”

“More change,” she said sympathetically.

“Indeed.” He seemed to be mulling something over, so she waited, giving him the space to talk at his own pace. Eventually he glanced up, eyes meeting hers. “It’s been very quiet,” he continued. “I find I… miss the bustle of activity I’d become accustomed to.” He looked faintly embarrassed at his admission.

Eve just grinned. “I miss you, too, my friend,” she said.

Jenkins smiled. “My friend,” he repeated, giving her a little bow. They drank in companionable silence after a while, and then Jenkins cleared his throat, and Eve knew they were getting to the heart of the matter. “Colonel – Eve,” he said. “I apologize for the fact that we never had, as you say, ‘that’ conversation about Morgan le Fay. It’s been difficult for me, confronting my history. I’ve spent a long time keeping the past locked away, and I’m not sure I’ll ever be willing to discuss it directly.”

She nodded her understanding. “I told you before, Jenkins – you’re allowed to have boundaries. You don’t have to reveal all your deepest, darkest secrets.”

“Indeed. Well – the thing is, Colonel – I wonder: at the river, with the loom of fate, did you perhaps… hear Dulaque call me by another name?” The words came out in a rush, and when he stole a glance at her, she could see the fear in his eyes. Eve was touched, seeing that emotion, to see that he was trying.

“I did,” she answered softly. “Galahad. And Morgan called you Galeas.” Jenkins’ eyes squeezed shut when she said the name, as though it pained him. “And I want you to know, Jenkins, that out of respect for you, I haven’t… I haven’t asked Flynn about either of those names.”

“Thank you,” he replied. “But perhaps…. Well, if you should one day decide that you’d like to look Galahad up in the card catalogue, and if by chance the library should direct you to resources that you’d like to read – I would… be amenable to that approach.” He was staring at his hands now, his cheeks tinged pink. Eve couldn’t recall ever seeing the man blush before.

She leaned forward and touched his arm. “One day I might,” she said. “And until then, I know everything I need to know about you already. You show up even when you’re frightened. You never do anyone’s work for them, but you always have our backs. When you see you’ve made a mistake, you do what you can to correct it.” Jenkins was squirming in his seat, sputtering. “And you really can’t take a compliment,” she finished.

“Well, I, uh, you see…”

“Forget it, Jenkins. Don’t deflect. Just this once, let me acknowledge you. Thank you for everything you’ve done.”

“It’s been my honour,” he replied, catching her eye with a look so serious and heartfelt that Eve felt _her_ cheeks flush. “You are one of the best guardians I have ever seen, Eve. No one has had to carry the burden of four librarians before, and you meet each one of them where they need you, building on their strengths, with unfailing energy and faith. I admire you.”

“Okay,” she replied, leaning back. “I get why you don’t like compliments now. Shall we change the subject? Did I hear right that you wouldn’t let Stone in through the back door when he came home from his last mission?”

Jenkins favoured her with one of his sneaky smiles. “Did he tell you about the garbage truck?” He began to relay the story.

The Annex rang with the laughter of friends.

+++

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There we go, all done! Hope you enjoyed it.
> 
> I wrote this little scene because I felt like there needed to be some explanation for why, after hooking back up with Flynn (who presumably knows who Jenkins is) and hearing his real name at the loom, Eve still said "If you are who I think you are" in the episode in season 2 where they're up against the Devil. Despite spending what I assume is as at least a few months with know-it-all Flynn and despite the fact that we know she researches proactively, Eve still hasn't confirmed who Jenkins is. I wanted to explore why and it seemed like a good note to end on. 
> 
> Thanks for reading.

**Author's Note:**

> When I finished Season 2 of the Librarians and Jenkins comments that he does have a guardian, I thought it would be interesting to see how his relationship with Eve developed to the point that this would be true. So I decided to re-watch season 1 and fill in the blanks to explore their developing friendship. 
> 
> It ended up being a lot more of an Eve-centric documentation of the season, so hopefully it is not too boring/repetitive with regard to the episodes. Lots of the dialogue comes from the show, with me filling in the bits that were not shown in order to flesh out their friendship. 
> 
> This was a much more extensive exercise in expanding the episodes than I've undertaken before, so I'd be happy to get some feedback on whether it was effective! Thanks for reading.


End file.
